There is a sense that photography is in a moment of genuine transformation, which, whether good or bad, is a fact for contemporary photographic culture. What is the source of these transformations? We all know that photography has been going through massive technological change, evolution or even, as some might call it, a technical revolution. Like many others aspects of life, computer technologies are changing the way we do things in photography.

For so long during the last part of the last century, ‘photography’ was defined as a set of more or less stable practices dispersed across myriad amateur and professional aesthetic-technological values. Even if we acknowledge that that period was not as stable as we now imagine today, all those values are now being reorganised in the light of new ideas, practices and technological changes. For professional, amateur, and those increasing number of people positioned somewhere in between, all these older forms and values are migrating into the new format of ‘digital’ industries.

Computers and the internet have in very uneven geographical ways created a new interface and a space that diminishes the distinctions between older media and their practices. It is easy to recognise the shifting shapes and patterns of new practices adapted from old ones. Just as film, theatre and radio once became the new ‘re-mediated’ content of television, so writing, photography and television become the new content of the computer screen and internet matrix of connections. Visual images, sounds, text and voice all converge and compete for attention in the same computer screen space. The effect of these converging practices, along with their data flows and algorithms is a new cultural space, often characterised as a constant stream of images, words and voices, like a stream of thoughts and ideas, which replicate the process of consciousness itself. In terms of photography, these image and idea-flows are facilitated by the increased automation of cameras and the new digital ‘darkroom’ techniques, which can be used to automatically ‘correct’ those faults that once gave analogue photographs their discrete charms and amateur form.

Today these new automated images and processes disrupt how we see the old ones. On the one hand, this creates for some the nostalgia for a format they never had, or in others, a way to refresh the vision of life today. Either way, these new forms and formats of image production and dissemination are not going away. One question we need to ask, then, is what are we going to do with these new formats? When the old photographic industries (e.g. advertising, family, fashion, journalism, police surveillance, tourism and travel) replicate themselves within these new formats, they are also surely mutating their forms and aesthetics in the process. Such is the rapidity of these mutations that it begins to seem almost anachronistic to make a distinction between amateur and professional photography. This is partly because of the general leveling of technology and democracy in the dual forms of the DSLR (Digital Reflex camera) and smartphone cameras, but also the new proximity between different forms and practices on computing machines and their screens.

Art, with its institutional protocols of white-spaced walls as the default modern format, is perhaps one of the institutional spaces that has resisted these new mutating practices more than others. In art, the object-based photographic print retains its value, alongside the frenzy of online ‘posting’, ‘click-bait’ and image-streams, even if these digital streams are linked to art websites. The ‘exhibition-value’ of art (as Walter Benjamin once put it) still endures, even if its forms and media have changed. Yet what is curious, if not astonishing, is how the leveling of photography through digital technology has spawned such a vast new range of social and cultural contemporary photographic practices. Not all of these practices are to be located within art institutions, because even though art is the ‘official’ location for creativity, it is not exclusively there that creative or critical innovations are to be found. Indeed, often it might seem that art institutions willfully avoid these things, preferring to stick to tried and tested ideas and values, rather than risk new options, wild forms and different ideas, which show the new diversity of work in photography. One of the fundamental effects of these transformations must surely be the new relation of photography to the question of belief.

Whilst photography has had a long monopoly and close relation to realism and notions of ‘truth’ in the course of its existence (e.g. seeing-is-believing), we must recognise that the will and wish to believe is beginning to dis-entangle itself from photography. In a judicial setting of court justice, a person is given the dignity of what is called ‘due process’ before they are cleared or convicted of something. Everywhere else, the impulse to judge something immediately on how it appears is presented to us as irresistible, as set within the immediacy and transitory speed of internet culture. The rise of ‘fictional’ photography, the new performances (gestures, poses and roles) adopted by people in photographs, videos, streamed memes and gifs, alongside the newfound enthusiasm for questionable archive photographs, all mean that the way we value the photographic image is changing. The new dictionary entries of ‘post-truth’ and ‘fake news’ are symptoms of this new state of affairs. If we think of photography now as part of this wider environment of digital images and sense of dis-belief, which inhabits many new social practices, then we might begin to grasp where, how and why photography is in a real process of transformation. Once the claims of realism are loosened, photography is free to follow other paths, and perhaps these are what we are beginning to glimpse.

This article was adapted from the preface of the publication Transformations, Exploring Changes in and Around Photography. ‘Transformations’ is a project that was initiated by Viewbook in 2016 to explore changes and support photography in a digitally connected world.

In this publication, photographers and photography professionals reflect on what they see as the most interesting transformations in and around photography today. Through essays, interviews, photographic work and short quotes, it raises a conversation on how technological changes and shifts within the industry affect the role and work of the photographer today. Seen from different geographical and cultural perspectives, the material gives a snapshot of some of the changing attitudes, institutional values and practices in photography.

The publication is available in print and as a free PDF.

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Transformations was originally published in Witness on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.