••• Photography? Notes on the Real Spectacle of Hypperreality in the Digital Age •••

• Janine Mapurunga •

June 2009

Universidad de Barcelona

Maestría en Estudios y Proyectos Sobre la Cultura Visual

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•••Since its birth, less than two hundred years ago, photography brought about a radical shift in vision, creating systems of social representation of values and signs that have become an intrinsic part of modern life. This medium has been disseminated through all corners of the planet at such an astounding rate that today it is almost impossible to meet someone who is not aware of the existence of photography. Regardless of geographic, social, political, cultural or religious affiliations, we are a world of image-makers and image-collectors.

Visual Culture is a field of study born of the need to make sense of the phenomenon of imagery. Many theorists claim that images are pedagogical, that we learn through them. The ideology of visual culture is “a ‘spectacle pedagogy’ in that images teach us what and how to see and think and, in doing so, they mediate the ways in which we interact with one another as social beings1.” In our modern times we do more than learn from images. We not only incorporate imagery in practically every aspect of our lives, we have begun to drastically shape our experiences due to the influence of images. But what does this mean to our global society today, at a time when we increasingly produce imagery ever more removed from reality? Advances in telecommunications and image-making technologies have produced a 1 Garoian & Gaudelius. (2004). The Spectacle of Visual Culture. Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research, 45(4), p. 298.

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world thirsty of images, but these images are increasingly more manipulated and continuously diverge from what we actually see in the real world. The overwhelming presence of digitally manipulated images in all aspects of the photographic archive remains largely unquestioned, yet these images guide our actions in real life. We have actually begun to change reality to emulate that of the images that we see. Offering more questions than answers, this paper aims to explore this paradox and urges us to question the implications of our current state of image hysteria.

•••Opening Thoughts

Una fotografía pasa por prueba incontrovertible de que sucedió algo determinado2.

Twenty-eight years ago Susan Sontag pondered that a photograph is

undeniable proof that an event took place. The year was 1981, the same year I was born. Twelve years later I created my first portrait. My first recollection of the 2 Sontag, Susan. (1981). Sobre la Fotografía. Alfaguara, p. 19.

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process of creating a photograph happened in 1993, when a younger version of me focused intensely through the piece of concave plastic that separated my eye from the black-eared white dog that sat on the windowsill of my grandmother’s house in a small village of northeastern rural Brasil. I was thrilled by my birthday present: a black box that carried the words Yashica MG-3 on the front and Made in China on the back.

Now I find myself in 2009, having used a variety of black boxes of all shapes

and sizes to create hundreds of thousands of photographs over the years. A lot has changed between 1981 and 2009, so much that we are now obliged to question Sontag’s affirmation. Photography has gone through a complete transformation. The black boxes have become smaller and ever more cleaver, performing an unimaginable variety of tasks that revolutionize the very meaning of photography. I no longer have to lock myself in a lightless room to unfold a long strip of film and wrap it around a metal reel, all very carefully not to damage it. I no longer have to mix chemicals at precise temperatures or wait to see the images I captured tattooed onto strips of film. My days as an alchemist are over. Today I can view my images in the split second that follows the split second in which they were captured. Since converting to digital photography, I no longer have to search for a coherent way to organize thousands of negatives that can be so easily damaged. Now my digital camera gives me images that are composed of intangible computer-generated codes of unimaginable complexity, which I can store in small metal boxes called hard drives. Although small in size, the hard drives have such an immense storage capacity that I can fit my entire body of work in a single unit. I would love to hear what Daguerre and Niépce, the two men considered the fathers of photography, would have to say about this.

Today, the same apparatus I use to create photographs can also be used to

record action and sound, containing entire sections of experiences in a black box that fits in my back pocket. I can then use this box to send such pieces of reality to my mother in the sunny coast of Brasil, where she can view them in her own box while sipping caipirinhas on the beach. Still using the same box I can call a long lost friend in Sri Lanka, get driving directions from Barcelona to Cadíz, look up weather conditions in the Pirineus, get updated on the latest tragedies from Iraq, compare airfares for a flight from Nairobi to Kigali, write a note to a client in California informing her that her wedding photos are ready and can be viewed on her box, find an apartment to rent in Grácia, sell my car in San Francisco, and thousands of other tasks, including writing these very words you are reading. I can do all of this with one small apparatus, while basking in the sun on the grasses of Park Montjuic. In 1981, it would have taken Sontag several days and multiple trips to different places to accomplish all of these tasks.

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At the same time, image manipulation technologies have also gone through

vast advances. Only ten years ago, one of the required assignments in my first photography portfolio was to create an image of a landscape without the touch of man. My subject of choice was El Capitan, a majestic granite peak that sits proudly in Yosemite National Park and one of the most famous destinations in California. It was the summer of 1999, and the park had been invaded by tourists. What I found was an El Capitan spotted with rock climbers from all over the world. It took me three hours in the darkroom to remove the insect-like men that dotted my image as they slowly reached the peak. Today I can accomplish such task in about fifteen seconds on my computer monitor with the use of the “band-aid tool” and a few clicks of the mouse.

Digital manipulation has become an indispensable aspect of photography.

Words like “airbrushing” and “photoshopping” are a normal part of our vocabulary. The technologies of image manipulation are so advanced that it is now almost impossible to know what the “photoshopped” subject looked like at the time the photograph was created. I was astonished the first time a magazine editor asked me to perform major changes to a portrait. While looking at my image on her computer screen, she said “Great portrait! You got a really nice expression on Mrs. Andrews’ face, now we just need to get rid of her double-chin.” At that moment I felt I was at the crossroads of an ethical dilemma. If I did as the editor asked and performed “virtual surgery” on Mrs. Andrews I would be pleasing the editor and perhaps guaranteeing future work with the magazine. But, in so doing, I would be creating a lie. That night, I modified the body of a major public figure and pondered on what photography had come to.

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••• On Photography

The startling technological feats that we have witnessed in the fields of image-making and telecommunications have surpassed my wildest imaginations. The marriage of these two subjects has brought us to the present state of image hysteria in which we find ourselves. But before getting there, I would like to highlight a few steps along the way.

Some argue that photography dates back over a thousand years with

experiments with the camera obscura and the pinhole camera3. The trajectory of modern photography is marked by the development of permanent photographs. French inventor Nicéphore Niépce created what is believed to be the first photograph in 18264. He would then partner with Louis Daguerre to produce the daguerreotype, a process that required less exposure time and thus was more suitable for portraiture, birthing what we now call commercial photography. Today we take photography for granted, but I often wonder how the photographic process 3 Krebs, Robert E. (2004). Groundbreaking Scientific Experiments, Inventions, and Discoveries of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Greenwood Publishing Group.

4 London, Barbara & Upton, John. (2007). Photography. Prentice Hall, p. 25.

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must have been perceived at that time. Imagine having the ability to imprint reality onto a two-dimensional pictorial object in an era when the latest technology included wooden tooth prosthetics!

The photographic process, with its unforeseen capacity to produce multiple

faithful reproductions of reality brought about a revolution of sight. With photography came a new system of representation unlike that of its predecessors – painting and sculpture. The technological developments of the nineteenth century birthed a number of serially produced objects, the most significant of which in terms of social and cultural impact, were photographs5. “The photograph becomes a central element not only in a new commodity economy but in the reshaping of an entire territory on which signs and images, each effectively severed from a referent, circulate and proliferate6.” The immediacy and accuracy7 of photography created not only an innovative way of recording reality but, most importantly, a new way of representing the world. Because of its unforeseen capacity to replicate what we see, photography affects our construction and relationship with reality unlike any other previously existing form of visual representation.

Photography was part of a “vast systemic rupture8” and became an element of a new homogeneous terrain of consumption and circulation in which the observer became lodged9. The use of photography generated sets of underlying codes dictating which subjects are visible and which are not, who is photographed and how, and under what conditions these images are displayed. As photography becomes a naturalized aspect of our lives, these codes become silently engraved in our way of interpreting and representing the world. Jonathan Crary speaks of the “photography effect10” of the nineteenth century as a key element in a new “cultural economy of value and exchange11.” Photography is more accessible than painting and sculpture, but still the power to produce images is in the hands of a few, namely the elite. According to Crary,

5 Crary, Jonathan. (1999). Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, p. 13.

6 Crary, Jonathan. (1999). Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, p. 13.

7 I use the word “accuracy” to refer to the widespread belief that a photograph represents the truth about a subject. I do not believe that a photograph is an accurate representation of any subject. A photographic image is a point of view of the subject. Meaning depends upon the vision of the photographer as well as the interpretation of the viewer.

8 Crary, Jonathan. (1999). Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, p. 13.

9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid.

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Photography and money become homologous forms of social power in the nineteenth century. They are equally totalizing systems for binding and unifying all subjects within a single global network of valuation and desire. […] It is through the distinct but interpenetrating economies of money and photography that a whole social world is represented and constituted exclusively as signs.12

He adds that both photography and money “are magical forms that establish a new set of abstract relations between individuals and things and impose those relations as real13.” Such elusive relations are also established between individuals and between individuals and places. The photograph becomes the key element through which we begin to form a collective memory of the subject, be it a person, place or event. It was in the nineteenth century that we began to experience a “new phenomenological account of the world as image14.” We begun to create an understanding of the subject based on photographs; to believe that we know a person, a place or an event because of the images we see of them. It was then that we started to form ideas about places we have never visited and people we have never met through images alone. The photographic image becomes largely accepted as accurate representation, as unquestionable truth about the subject.

Furthermore, the emergent technologies of image production become the

dominant models of visualization according to which primary social processes and institutions function15. Photography, as absolute proof, is used in various segments of society, sometimes resulting in the exclusion of certain groups of people. Such is the case with the emergence of the use of photography to categorize certain types of marginalized people within societies. Alphonse Bertillon elaborated a series of standardized tests and measurements to decipher the ‘criminal type16.’ In his essay entitled The Body and the Archive, Alan Sekula brings to our attention that some “discovered in photography an instrument of social control and differentiation underwritten by dubious scientific principles17” fueled by “positivist attempts to define and regulate social deviance.”18 He reflects on the work of Bertillon and that

12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Enwezor, Okwui. (2008). Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art. New York:

International Center for Photography & Gottinguen: Steidl Publishers, p. 12. 15 Crary, Jonathan. (1999). Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th

Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, p. 13. 16 Enwezor, Okwui. (2008). Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art. New York:

International Center for Photography & Gottinguen: Steidl Publishers, p. 13. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid.

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of Francis Galton, an English statistician who aimed to define the ‘racially inferior’ using photographic archives19.

In this way, photography “can be linked to an anthropological space in which

to observe and study the way members and institutions of a society reflect on their relationship to it20.” The photographic image becomes “anthropological artifact21” and is given “the authority of social instrument22.” The photographic archive becomes a (naturalized) key component of modern life in various aspects, including crime investigation and other police-related procedures, personal and family archive, media and advertising, news, surveillance, and ethnographic studies. Photography hit humankind like lightening and progressively became an indispensable component of modern life across the globe.

••• The Burning Desire

En lo fundamental, tener una experiencia se transforma en algo idéntico a fotografiarla, y la participación en un acontecimiento público equivale cada vez más a mirarlo en forma de fotografía. […] Hoy todo existe para culminar en una fotografía.23

19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Sontag, Susan. (1981). Sobre la Fotografía. Alfaguara, p. 44.

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In the early 1820’s, Niépce conducted chemical experiments in his laboratory

in France that would lead to the invention of modern photography as we know it. His discovery was so ground-breaking that it produced a “burning desire24” to transpose nature into a pictorial fact, a yearning expressed by Daguerre in a letter to Niépce: “I am burning with desire to see your experiments from nature.25” With Kodak’s invention of the commercial process at the end of the nineteenth century came the creation of an “endless stream of faithful reproductions, which set the entire world of users into a feverish pace of pictorial generation and accumulation26.” The advances in the photographic process allowed for the dissemination of photographs with an ease and convenience impossible with painting and sculpture. In only a few decades, the photograph went from being a completely new invention available to a select few, to a mainstream technology present in nearly every aspect of our lives.

This culminates in what Enzewor refers to as a “mode of thinking the world

framed within a picture27.” This is where we find ourselves today – a world imagined largely through images. We are now more than ever ‘burning with desire’ to photograph everything. It is through photographs that we create imagined pictures of life and we actually shape our experiences based on these images. Inspired by photographs from advertisements and postcards, tourists spend large sums of money to travel to far off lands. They arrive with a pre-conceived notion about the place and they expect their experiences to match those imagined through the photographs they have seen. Take a visit to any world-famous tourist destination and you will probably see that, upon arriving at the location, many tourists use their cameras to create photographs that replicate the standardized travel images that are overly circulated in the global archive. After the specific photograph has been achieved, they often march off to the next location, where they will create more photographs in this fashion.

With this serial archive production, the tourists create evidence that they

were physically present in that particular location. After a two-week tour of Italy, John Doe will arrive back to his home in Minnesota with a photograph of himself ‘pushing,’ ‘kicking,’ or ‘climbing onto’ the Tower of Pisa, like thousands have done before him. Mr. Doe will proudly show his vacation photos to his friends and family. The images are demonstrable proof that he was present at those places, but what this type of practice lacks is the actual experience of traveling. The habit of going to 24 Enwezor, Okwui. (2008). Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art. New York:

International Center for Photography & Gottinguen: Steidl Publishers, p. 12. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid.

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one place after another to collect images does not allow the time necessary to actually get to know a place, its people, or its culture. In this way, it can be said that the camera becomes a kind of impediment, keeping the tourist from fully experiencing the new surroundings. The tourist’s main objective is to collect images and photography is the mediator of the encounter between the tourist and the new place.

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As photography becomes incessantly more accessible and telecommunication technologies continue to advance, this kind of image production, what I call serial image accumulation, increasingly becomes the dominant modus operandi of amateur photographers all over the world. This type of personal archiving goes beyond visual documentation; it is the creation of a purposefully fictional history of one’s life. Arguably, all photography is fiction, as a photograph is the photographer’s interpretation of the subject. However, as photography has been widely accepted as a true representation of the subject, so has serial image accumulation. What sets this type of photography apart is a matter of scale because of the unforeseen capacity to create and manipulate the photographic archive. If, at a time not long ago, people used the camera to document important events in their lives, now the camera is often present as a part of one’s daily routine. People are now more than ever armed with cameras at all times, creating a seemingly endless archive of their lives and sharing it others through the rapid technologies of the web.

This image hysteria is at the very core of the present day craze over online

communities and virtual spaces. During the last five years there has been a mushrooming of such websites, placeless spaces that do not exist beyond the virtual world of pixels and computer codes. As the list grows almost daily, I struggle to keep track. There is Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Orkut, Friendster, YouTube, Blogger, and dozens of other virtual locales where people all over the world can share their images and other slices of personal information with thousands (even millions) of people they will never meet in person. A short visit to someone’s profile page on Facebook can easily reveal hundreds of photographs of that person in various circumstances. These images evidence the person’s sociality; they speak of the person’s involvement in various layers of society, creating a virtual show-and-tell that becomes a fictional story of someone’s life.

I am a member of Facebook, and so are many members of a particular group

of friends in California. We periodically organize parties and dinners to which almost everyone comes armed with a camera. I have noticed that, more often than not, most of the time during these social gatherings is dedicated to picture taking. People who sometimes barely know each other pile up in group pictures that would have us believe they are long time friends. They gather for the photo, wearing big smiles on their faces and wrapping their arms around each other. For the few seconds involved in posing for the photo, everyone displays the intimacy of a friendship, but after the flash is gone, they quickly disperse, failing to establish any in depth interaction with one another. Jane Doe leaves the gathering with her digital camera filled with images, which quickly make their way onto Facebook. The photographs adorn Ms. Doe’s online profile, sending a message to her ‘online friends’ that she is a popular person surrounded by many friends. The images

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contribute to the creation of a fictional persona, one who is living a desirable, exciting life. “The most abstract of the senses, and the most easily deceived, sight is naturally the most readily adaptable to present-day society’s generalized abstraction28.” Today, millions of people only know each other’s online personas, which are based largely on the photographs posted online. In such online interactions, the understandings of one another are created mostly through images.

••• The Spectacle of Hyperreality

In a society dominated by the production and consumption of images, no part of life can remain immune from the invasion of the spectacle29.

The fiction created through photographs in online communities is a virtual

façade that obscures reality. “The current rise in private and public forms of surveillance through mass mediation supports this understanding of ‘our desires to be consumed by and in images30.” In this new way of communicating with world, photography is a key element through which people establish a public image of themselves. An increasing number of people are eager to have their illusory personas broadcasted to the global audience of the Internet. The combination of digital photography with telecommunications has birthed a new way of representing oneself, not locally, but globally. “The new electronic interdependence re-creates the world in the image of a global village31.” However, as Guy Debord reveals,

Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacle’s present vulgarity32.

In our times, the ‘culture of the spectacle’ that Foucault and many others have theorized about is ignited by the image hysteria that results from the intersection of

28 Guy Debord quoted in Crary, Jonathan. (1999). Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and

Modernity in the 19th Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, p. 19. Original quote from Debord, Guy. (2006). The Society of the Spectacle. AKPress, sec. 18.

29 Christopher Lasch quoted in Garoian & Gaudelius. (2004). The Spectacle of Visual Culture. Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research, 45(4), p. 298.

30 Garoian & Gaudelius. (2004). The Spectacle of Visual Culture. Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research, 45(4), p. 299.

31 Guy Debord quoted in Chong, Doryun. (2007). Goodly Creatures, Beauteous Mankind, O Brave New Worlds. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, p. 96.

32 Marshall McLuhan quoted in Chong, Doryun. (2007). Goodly Creatures, Beauteous Mankind, O Brave New Worlds. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, p. 96.

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digital photography and telecommunications. For Debord, the spectacle is “not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images33.” The capacity for image-production and diffusion is widespread in the hands of the masses like never before. Everyday, millions of images circulate through the digital waves, from the black boxes where they originate, to computer screens and other black boxes all over the world. Photographs (in the form of personal archive, news, and advertisements) are diffused at light speed. It can be said that today, photography is a main mode of interaction and exchange between people across the globe. Photographs convey meaning, working in the formation of a perceived truth and a collective memory of the subject.

33 Guy Debord quoted in Garoian & Gaudelius. (2004). The Spectacle of Visual Culture. Studies in

Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research, 45(4), p. 299.

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At the same time, photographic images no longer necessarily have a real referent to the subject they represent in actuality. Today, it is with incredible ease that almost anyone can manipulate images to create seamless fictional two-dimensional reproductions of reality, which can then be disseminated rapidly all over the world. Yes, times have changed. Pick up any major popular magazine on newsstands anywhere in the globe and what you will see are heavily manipulated images that show a world of incredible perfection: people with skin so flawless that they often resemble smooth plastic dolls, and elderly people whose face lacks any signs of their age.

These are examples of the world we are made to see today, a world of fantasy

that we are increasingly trying to emulate. There is another reality coexisting with actuality, a ‘hyperreality’ that is interweaved in our daily experiences through life. “An entire culture (the West) is now geared towards deception, in other words, the production of virtual reality and the ‘counterfeit34.” To Jean Baudrillard, hyperreality is “a world without a real origin35,” a world that no longer has the real as part of the equation36. He adds that, “we are no longer in a logic of the passage from virtual to actual but in a hyperrealist logic of the deterrence of the real by the virtual37”. The hyperreality created through digital manipulation is ceasing to exist solely in the two-dimensional world of images; it has become to take three-dimensional shape. We are bringing the fictional world to life. The hyperreal is sheltered from any distinction between the real and the imaginary38. The increasing numbers of people whose bodies have obviously been altered through plastic surgery are walking proof that we have begun to blur the lines between reality and fiction. In Baudrillard’s view, representation comes to precede reality, in what he famously called “the precession of simulacra39.” In this environment, the real dissolves into the hyperreal, and life as we know it begins to take a different shape. Drastic cosmetic surgery has become widely accepted in western societies. Increasingly alarming numbers of people are willing to undergo major surgical procedures to change their bodies at any cost. They do so to conform to the standards of beauty established by the images seen in mass media outlets. Because they stem from digitally enhanced imagery, such standards of beauty are humanly impossible. The people of today look up to bodies that are not real and many of them

34 Jean Baudrillard quoted in Lane, Richard. (2009). Jean Baudrillard. Routledge, p. 96. Original

quote from Baudrillard, Jane. (1995). Simulacra and Simulation – The Body, In Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism. University of Michigan Press.

35 Lane, Richard. (2009). Jean Baudrillard. Routledge, p. 87. 36 Ibid. 37 Lane, Richard. (2009). Jean Baudrillard. Routledge, p. 96. 38 Jane Baudrillard in Mirzoeff, Nicolas. (2002). The Visual Culture Reader. Routledge, p. 146. 39 Mirzoeff, Nicolas. (2002). The Visual Culture Reader. Routledge, p. 114.

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are willing to go through any lengths to create in themselves the images they see in the media. Multiple sequential surgeries turn many people into walking deformities, with bloated lips full of fat extracted from their behinds and silicon-filled breasts ballooning under their shirts. The idea of undergoing the scalpel to modify one’s racial physiognomy is not unheard of, and such is the case with many people of Asian descent who choose to have their eyes surgically modified to resemble those of their Caucasian counterparts. As the real no longer has to be rational40, we have come to accept the presence of an increasing group of human shape-shifters living among us.

40 Jane Baudrillard in Mirzoeff, Nicolas. (2002). The Visual Culture Reader. Routledge, p. 146.

••• Hang Mioku: injected cooking oil into her own face Hang Mioku, a 48 year-old woman from South Korea, became so addicted to plastic surgery that she was left unrecognizable after her obsession led her to inject cooking oil into her face. She had her first plastic surgery procedure when she was 28. Following operation after operation, her face was eventually left enlarged and disfigured, and the surgeons she visited refused to carry out any more work on her and one suggested that her obsession could be a sign of a psychological disorder. So Hang resorted to injecting cooking oil into her face. It became so grotesquely large that she was called "standing fan" by children in her neighborhood - due to her large face and small body. As Hang's notoriety spread she was featured on Korean TV. Viewers seeing the report took mercy on her and sent in enough donations to enable her to have surgery to reduce the size of her face. During the first procedure surgeons removed 60g of foreign substance from Hang's face and 200g from her neck. After several other sessions her face was left greatly reduced but still scarred and disfigured41.

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The images that guide us today, the ones we look up to, have absolutely no reference to reality. They are a product of the digital age, of a Photoshop experience of endless possibilities. Some of the most pervasive means of producing realistic effects in mass visual culture are based on a radical abstraction and reconstruction of the optical experience42. As the technologies of image-manipulation are constantly upgraded, the images that guide us and influence our actions move further from reality. But even though we are aware of their falseness, even though we know the façade, we are still willing to let them guide us. “Eventually, Baurdrillard thinks that hyperreality will be the dominant way of experiencing and understanding the world43.” Billions of dollars are spent every year in the cosmetic and health industries, as people continue to change their bodies to imitate the super humans pictured in photographs. These images are abstractions of reality, but yet they influence our actions in real life.

41 http://www.oddee.com/item_96587.aspx 42 Crary, Jonathan. (1999). Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th

Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, p. 9. 43 Lane, Richard. (2009). Jean Baudrillard. Routledge, p. 88.

••• Donatella Versace: a caricature of herself Although nose jobs are usually done to make a nose smaller, Donatella’s has grown larger over the years. It is also wider and flatter and slightly crooked, indicating that at least one bad nose job took place. In addition to her big nose, Donatella also has large lips, like the trout pouts of the Hollywood divas the designer dresses. Although the fashion icon has always had big lips, the oversized upper lip indicates that fillers, like collagen, have been used liberally. For a 53-year old, Donatella’s skin is very firm, indicating a possible facelift. She probably also uses dermal injectables like Botox to eliminate wrinkles, even when she smiles. Her tight face is a strong contrast to the loose skin on the rest of her body. And yes, Donatella’s weight loss also revealed her breast implants44.

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••• Closing Thoughts A few weeks ago a bride asked me during a consultation if I could replace the grey sky of a possibly rainy wedding day with hues of blue and puffy white clouds. She was planning an early March wedding in the Californian wine region of Napa, a place well known to be very wet this time of the year. The bridal worry seeped through her nervous smile. I replied to her that, although I have the technical skills to create such a change, I would not be willing to do it. Her puzzled face asked me why, saying she would be willing to pay extra to have this service done in case it was necessary. I advised her that, in the chance of rain on her wedding day, she could come equipped with colorful umbrellas, which would be a great addition to her photographs. I imagined her and her groom walking through the grapevines, their kisses protected from the lazy raindrops by large, red umbrellas whose color exploded amongst all the grey that surrounded them.

My imagination ran wild and I could already foresee marvelous portraits.

Flat faced, she obviously did not share my fantasy. She insisted that her wedding day photographs show a sunny day with blue sky. I explained to her that such a drastic alteration in the representation of her wedding day was not in accordance with my photographic principles and that I was not willing to visually create what was not there to begin with. I told her that, although I use digital cameras in my work, the modifications I am willing to make on my images are mostly those basic changes that photographers have been using since the times of the darkroom: contrast, density, and color adjustments that enhance the quality of the images. She hired someone else to photograph her wedding. It amazes me that it is with great indifference that we have come to embrace reality transformation. This woman insisted on having a representation of an event, her wedding day, that did not reference to the actual reality of the day. As she pre-planned a misrepresentation, she specifically wanted her personal photographic archive to evidence a non-truth. In so doing, she is creating a hyper version of her own reality. The existence of the visual representation justifies the fictional story and this story eventually becomes truth. After the passage of time, the photographs of the blue sky are evidence that she was married on a bright, sunny day. The grey skies of March will probably become a faint memory, until one day they cease to exist completely and the only reality left is that expressed in the photographs. “The capacity for mechanical inscription and the order of direct reference that links the photograph with the indisputable fact of the subject’s existence are the bedrock of

44 http://www.oddee.com/item_96587.aspx

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photography and film45”. What does it mean then, when the photograph no longer references to a subject that existed in reality? Does it mean that it is no longer photography, but something closely related and yet different? Are the existing guidelines adequate to analyze the discourse of these new photograph-hybrids? In other words, can we continue to approach photography the same way we did before the digital age, or do we need new tools to count for the massive technological changes? Have we entered an era of post-photography and post-representation?

As we continuously embrace the new technologies imposed on us, the large majority of image-makers and image-consumers fails to question the implications of these technologies in our lives. The visual will continue to be relentlessly abstract46 and now this abstraction is overflowing to the physical and the archive. We have seen that the image-making and telecommunications technologies are limitless, but are we? How far are we willing to accept the influence of images in our lives? Will we arrive at a day when the line between reality and fiction is completely erased?

45 Enwezor, Okwui. (2008). Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art. New York:

International Center for Photography & Gottinguen: Steidl Publishers, p. 11. 46 Crary, Jonathan. (1999). Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th

Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, p. 2.

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••• Images

All images were collected from the unregulated virtual waves of the web. Images and text highlighted on pages 16 and 17 were extracted from the blogger site:

http://www.oddee.com/item_96587.aspx

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