Sarah Kember
[Writer and critic, lives in London.]
A photograph of the pyramids is an image-idea of the pyramids, it is not the pyramids.
Computer manipulated and simulated imagery appears to threaten the truth status of photography even though that has already been undermined by decades of semiotic analysis. How can this be? How can we panic about the loss of the real when we know (tacitly or otherwise) that the real is always lost in the act of representation?
[The] transformative experience of the self based on an uncanny encounter with the real has been at the heart of our persistent (but irrational) faith in photography.
Digital images may be regarded as partial rather than universal forms of knowledge, and as image statements rather than truth.