It should go without saying that the way we interact with photography has undergone a seismic shift since the days of the album or the shoebox full of snapshots. More and more of our photographs are never printed but stored on our computers and shared through social networking sites like Facebook. We also have far more photographs than ever before, so we need new ways to store and organise these images. Metadata – which the Oxford Dictionary defines as: “A set of data that gives information about other data” [1] – is a critical component of our new photographic ecology, as it exerts a huge influence on both the storage and the visibility of our photographs. Continue reading
Susan Sloan
Digital Indexicality beyond Photography
I’ve hopefully by now established that the index is a sign with a physical connection to its referent, which might, but may very well but not necessarily also share with it a visual likeness. In my last post, I touched on process as being a key component of indexicality – that it is the process by which something comes into being that makes it indexical or not. If a chemical photograph can be considered an index by virtue of its method of production forcing it to correspond ‘point by point to nature’ [1] can this not also apply to digital media? Continue reading