Fixing the art of digital photography: Electronic shadows

Today we seem to stand at the brink of an enonnous revolution in imaging, photography and infonnation circulation. Approaching the millennium, we are well primed to recognize the power of new technologies and of dramatic paradigm shifts in our culture. Previously separate aspects of culture and media are irrevocably set into new relations, and the position of photography in a suddenly enriched field of complex, postmodern electronic media is somewhat bewildering. What is being gained? What is lost? How are the most prescient of practitioners responding to the dizzying pace of change? Before trying to answer these questions, it is necessary to pause long enough to recognize the ring of familiarity in the brief description above. Is this not very much like the situation in 1839 when the announcements of the inventions of photography began? The burgeoning of digital imaging and its transformation of our world brings us closer to the nineteenth-century world-view than we had ever before imagined we might find ourselves again.