Analog to Digital: The Indexical Function of Photographic Images - Corey Dzenko

Marshall McLuhan: "The medium is the message."

The 'medium'  is any extension of the human senses .

The 'message' explains how a new medium affects culture.

Digital photography accelerated and enlarged traditional photographic processes due to transforming photographs from objects into data. This change from analog to digital photography challenges changed whether photography remains a representation of reality.

A digital photograph means a lack of physical connection between the photographs subject and image. An analog photographic process contained a certain 'physicality' that the a creation of digital photographs do not possess.

In digital technology it's easier to edit tangible data to create images of subject that never existed in reality, which casts doubt on the connections made between photography and reality. However, digital images rely heavily on how we understand analog photography as we treat them in the same way. 

Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin use the term 'remediation' to describe how characteristics of older media are used to establish the cultural uses of newer media. They claim that when a medium has convinced viewers of its immediacy, then following media attempts to make use of this. For example, graphic icons used on computers are used again to identify a similar piece of software.

By maintaining the conventions in which we understand analog photography, a transition has been created from analog photographs to digital photographs. Online newspapers still follow the same structure for their articles of printed newspapers for example.

Kerry Skarbakka - Stairs (2002)

This image was posted to the website FailBlog.org by the photographer. Viewers of the website responded to the image as if the subject was actually falling down the stairs and failed to realise this image has actually been constructed by the photographer through editing techniques. The viewers read this photograph as if it was reality and not a manipulated image. This is an example of how we still understand digital photographs as if they were analog photographs. Dzenko argues that these images impact viewers' reception of images more than theories of digital photography's lack of indexicality.