It is likely that as the photographic medium becomes digital there will be a reaction to this increase in the arbitrariness of the photographic base. Cults will arise in reactionary attempts to counter what will be correctly seen as an extreme separation of motivation and arbitrariness in the production of (photographic) images. This is already happening. However, as the analogical photographic base is progressively displaced by the digital, the production of images will no longer be recognizably photographic. Technical reproduction is photographic only for a certain historical period.


Two extremes must be avoided: first, any contribution to the cultic fabrication of mythic auratic communities, and secondly, the wholesale rejection of the photographic aura with the presumption of some kind of Hegelian Aufhebung at work in the capitalist mode and relations of production. I call this twofold avoidance "the image between Benjamin and Adorno," a photogrammic version of Camus" "La pensée de midi."


I think the photographic sense of the image should be retained only because this image refers to something we have been taught to recognize as real within the photographic image. Photographic reality is a powerful frame if that frame can simultaneously show that what is recognized is also other - better than what it is ordinarily taken to be. If photographic art can show this — and this is what I think the auratic photographic artwork achieves —, photographic art can become a chapter in the history of art. Art always transforms the reality forming it. Artists just happen to be the primary beneficiaries of this entanglement.

James R. Watson