Digital technology has vastly altered what both still and motion picture photographers can accomplish, yielding images that only a generation ago would have been impossible. Special effects, back in the analog era, were extremely difficult and time consuming to produce, and with few exceptions never looked very convincing. But here in the 21st century, manipulated imagery such as shown in the "before and after" photos above (from The Hobbit) has reached a stunning degree of realism, thanks to computer-generated imagery (CGI) and other forms of digital wizardry. Advertising, entertainment, and art photography have entered a realm of almost endless possibilities. Some critics would argue that the integrity of photography is compromised; however, they don't seem to be having much influence. The digital age seems firmly entrenched in society.

Lev Manovich has stated that "normal photography never existed", an observation that is true in a sense- photography branched off into a number of different schools very shortly after its inception. We've seen even from early documentarians that photos were sometimes staged or re-touched in the darkroom. So it's not a case of subversion with digital technology to blame; the subversion was already established. Digital has simply made it easier, and put the ability to do so in all our hands. In his essay The Paradoxes of Digital Photography, Manovich also observes: "What is faked, of course, is not reality but photographic reality... in other words, what computer graphics has achieved is not realism, but photorealism... the reason we think it's succeeded is that... over the course of the past 150 years we have come to accept the image of photography and film as reality" (246).

Liz Wells, in Photography: A Critical Introduction, gives an excellent overview: "Traditionally, images were analogue in nature. That is, they consisted of physical marks and signs of some kind (whether brush marks, ink rubbed into scored lines, or the silver salts of the photographic print) carried by material surfaces. The marks and signs are virtually inseparable from these surfaces" (314). Digital media, however, have no physical reality- they are electronic information, binary code stored within computer circuitry. There is no need to print a digital photo onto something tangible unless one desires to. Many people just keep virtual photo albums.

One cannot help but wonder what the next developments (pun intended) will be... There doesn't seem to be any further dimensions to go- except maybe actual "virtual reality", where our eyes themselves see a totally realistic-looking panorama (something like the "holodeck" in the Star Trek universe). It would be interesting if we could somehow step inside a photo or painting, and go "through the looking-glass".

Works Cited

Wells, Liz. Photography: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, 2009. Print.

Wells, Liz. The Photography Reader. London: Routledge, 2003. Print.