English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

In an execptionally short essay (2 pages) Geoffrey Batchen, who teaches the history of photography at U. New Mexico posits that there is a critical difference between analogue and digital photography that I think is extremely interesting when considering rhetoric and truth claims.

Some quotes:
"Let's Begin with a basic proposition: what photography gave to modernity was not vision, but touch (or, more precisely, vision as a form of touch). And let's test it against another: this embodied type of vision is what is at stake in the current shift from photographic to electronic media." Essentially, a photograph exists because an object existed, light touched that object then touched chemicals on paper and left an imprint of, not the idea of the object, but of the object's physical presence. (See also Andre Bazin's The Ontology of the Photographic Image and Walter Benjamin's, well, lots of Benjamin).

Amylea began the discussion of how bringing three bags of photography prothetics is percieved as an increase of experience and the attempt to "capture" the experience of the Indianapolis zoo.

I was hanging out with some friends Saturday night and one of them started using her laptop to take pictures of us under the guise of showing us picture (being both the photogrpahed object and the viewing subject simultaneously - heavy stuff, viewing the viewer who views).