ABSTRACT:
In 1994 W.J.T. Mitchell talked of ‘the emergence of digital imaging as a welcome opportunity to expose the aporias in photography’s construction of the visual world, to deconstruct the very ideas of photographic objectivity and closure, and to resist what has become an increasingly sclerotic pictorial tradition.’ To what extent has the recent consumer boom in digital cameras allowed such deconstruction? What are the principal institutions associated with digital photography and to what extent do they constrain or enable a more democratic culture of image making with an attendant critical reflection on the politics of the image? Through a discussion of the idiomatic genres of image making drawing on the work of Feldges (2004) and an interrogation of Kress and Van Leeuwen’s Reading Images: the Grammar of Visual Design (1996), the potential and limits of the consumer boom in digital imaging will be explored.
