On "Of Pixels and Paradox"

After reading Fred Ritchin's chapter of Pixels and Paradox in his book After Photography, I have the depressing sense that image making in the digital age has lost any sort of personal meaning.  The sheer amount of images that we encounter and the validity of those images beg the question, is it worth making images?  I say, yes.  Perhaps my images will be lost as a drop in a vast bucket (www.photobucket.com) of images, but I know that my images, however insignificant, were made with a touch of my personality.  I know that my photographs were made at a certain time.  The subject of my photographs were seen with my eyes at a particular place and time of my life; the people in my photographs are recognizable to me and to themselves.  At the end of the day, this microcosmic recognition is what is most important to me.  Perhaps, in the future, if people do look at my photographs, they might look at it as something that is "generic and mass reproduced" (49), but that does not matter to me.  I know that I took the photograph, and at the time it was a unique moment for me and my subject.   Is this attitude toward my photographs enough to continue making images in this image saturated world?  Always the answer is, yes, because the act of photographing is what is important to me.  If anything, I want to print my photographs, to add that sort of preciousness that is missing from the digital file floating on the internet.  I want to grab my image out of the air.  I want  the floating signifier to float less and stay for a while.  The monetary incentive to make prints is secondary to my desire to turn my memories into a tangible object, something that I can carry with me, in my pocket, easily referenced without the need to retrieve it from a digital wasteland.

Ritchin's dystopian view of the world of images is rather disconcerting.  He mentions the idea of how our genotypes will be classified in the future and will be available for scrutiny (perhaps even through images).  We will become cyborgs like the "Replicants" in Bladerunner who are falsely assured of their humanity through faked childhood photographs.  Perhaps it is true that we are being deceived by the digital images that we make.  Perhaps we attribute too much of our humanity from false or manipulated images, but that is the condition of our age.  This digital world that we are born into is inescapable.  It is already written into our genomes.  I suppose it becomes, then, a matter of personal responsibility to create images that are personally valid.  If our images define who we are, and if that is a false or manipulated being, then it is up to the individual to project personal meaning into those images.  I feel that this is the only way to avoid (or at least alleviate) this feeling of digital alienation in world saturated with images.