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During a 1998 interview, German photographer Andreas Gursky stated that since the photographic medium has been digitized, "a fixed definition of the term 'photography' has become impossible."1 His statement echoes the written thoughts of several current photographers and scholars who have announced that photography is in the midst of an identity crisis with various apocalyptic names and explanations, including: "post-photography," "the post-medium condition," "photography after photography," and "the death of photography." These discussions are premised on the argument that the emergence of digital-manipulation software in the 1980s caused the medium to lose touch with one of its defining characteristics: its relationship to the real, or its indexicality.
Digital photography has failed to measure up to those revolutionary prophecies. Since its invention, the medium of photography has had a malleable relationship to the real. In the essay accompanying his Plate XX: Lace from the book The Pencil of Nature (1844), William Henry Fox Talbot notes the photogram's ability "to exhibit the pattern with accuracy."2 However, Talbot also dedicates a significant portion of that text to explaining the image's ¿«accuracy: the piece of lace, originally black, appears to be white in the photograph. Early published comments about Louisjacques-Mandé Daguerre's 1838 photograph Boulevard du Temple remark on the photograph's fidelity to the appearance of the Paris street. These accounts also note the puzzling way in which the image's extended exposure omits moving objects such as carriages and pedestrians. Another often-overlooked founding father of photography, Hippolyte Bayard, "faked" - or rather, staged - his own death in Self Portrait as a Drowned Man (1840). The contingent nature of pre-digital photographic "truth" is the central thesis of the upcoming exhibition "Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop" (October 2012-February 2013) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Before the digital age, photography's conditional relationship to the real was reiterated with techniques such as lateral reversals, montage and collage, multiple exposures, retouching, handpainting, and composite image-making practices. Lenses, filters, fast-moving shutters, swiveling cameras that sequentially exposed plates, moving film, masked apertures, and flash illumination further enabled photography's expressions of a malleable realism. Captions, shifting reception contexts (further accentuated by reproduction), and varying cultural functions reframed and destabilized notions of singular interpretations. As Corey Dzenko argued in Afterimage, viewers' expectations...