The conundrum however remains that whilst the computational image produces something other than a photograph, its effect is to intensify and saturate everyday life with photography. Writing in 1995, the media scholar Lev Manovich characterised the post-photographic turn as a paradox in which “the digital image annihilates photography while solidifying, glorifying and immortalizing the photographic.” This was because “[t]he digital image tears apart the net of semiotic codes, modes of display, and patterns of spectatorship in modern visual culture – and, at the same time, weaves this net even stronger.” 3Lev Manovich, “The Paradoxes of Digital Photography”, in:
Photography After Photography. Memory and Representation in the Digital Age, exh.-cat., ed. Hubertus von Amelunxen, Stefan Igelhaut and Florian Rötzer (Dresden: GB Arts, 1996), 57–65, here 57. Anne-Marie Willis, writing earlier in this period, framed digitisation as a macabre process which cannibalises and regurgitates photographic imagery to the point where, “like a zombie” photography’s corpse is “re-animated, by a mysterious new process, to inhabit the earth”. 4Anne-Marie Willis, “Digitisation and the Living Death of Photography”, in:
Culture, Technology & Creativity in the Late Twentieth Century, ed. Philip Hayward (London: John Libbey, 2003), 197–208, here 198. The spectre of zombie photography has more recently been taken up by Andrew Dewdney who emphasises that what is presently being elevated to museums and galleries as contemporary practices “is not photography as reproduction, nor the networked image, but an abstraction of the analogue and its historical archive.” 5Andrew Dewdney, “Curating the Photographic Image in Networked Culture”, in
The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, 2nd edition, ed. Martin Lister (London: Routledge, 2013), 95–112, here 109. From the Tate to the Google Art Project, he asserts that cultural institutions remain under the spell of “zombie photography” which he defines as “either the continuation of the analogue in digital terms or conversely the networked image simulating the analogue. The first is achieved through digital technology producing the photographic print image and the second through the Internet’s transparent interface.” 6Andrew Dewdney, “Zombie Photography: Or, the Long Afterlife of the Analogue Image”, Keynote Presentation
Kraesj! Brytninger I fotoarkivet conference, Oslo, May 2014. Available:
https://openresearch.lsbu.ac.uk/download/145dc25a686a1dd8a16f121fb867214e2244329417e3831ea3e09795271c08a8/149648/Zombie%20Photography.pdf