Yes, it is still around – the problem of the image / representation … It is been some time that digitization was set on one level together with the loss of indexicality. It’s become more complex as the image is still around, still feeds the instances of imagination, but as L.U. Marks states ‘digitization has come to coding’ one could say it is necessary to know how to read images. The complexity of the image hardly can be described only by the technologies involved in creation and transmission. Latour defines that the image itself cannot be taken as representation any longer, that it is the flow which makes imaginary relevant:
I might not totally agree but can support the concept of flow as a very important one – thus it might be equally be influenced trough narrative strategies of various kinds and more than before touching various sensual attentions …
newsgrit published a review ‘on representation’ by looking at the photographs of Arbus and Clark why if so then photography might be more likely related to the art of looking than to any represenative mode…
Personally I am extremely reluctant to photograph people, even people I know. But if I were telling a story through images I wouldn’t hesitate one minute to use friends or strangers as models. Is it so hard to believe that Arbus’s so-called freaks or Clark’s speed-freak teenagers are actors, or found images that stand-in for the photographer? Or that these freaks and speed-freaks are the subjects of voyeuristic fictions that allow unimpeded scopophilia? It is ultimately not what you are looking at that is important, but the looking itself.
