Author Description

The advent of the image-oriented computer in the mid-1980s is having a radical effect on the central place of photography in visual culture. What does this new technology of images mean for the ways in which we encounter and use images in everyday life: in advertising, entertainment, news, evidence? Within our domestic and private worlds, how does it influence our sense of self and identity, our view of the body and our sexuality? Are we now entering a post-photographic era? The Photographic Image in Digital Culture examines and questions the impact of digital technologies on the importance of the photographic image. Contributors investigate such issues as the representation of the body, surveillance and pornography; the role of images in the processes of memory, history and identity; popular myths of digital futures and technological utopias; the forms and conventions of new media; photography's place within image technologies and its continuing relationship to documentation, art, the imagination and political change.