“A quantum leap” asks us to look at photography in relation to theories of how we view and understand the world, particularly quantum physics. Ritchin asserts that the ways we view and react to analog and digital photography is analogous to the behavior of light. Light, in the famed double slit experiment , reacts in two ways when passing through slits: light particles can manifest as waves or just behave as though they are separate particles, depending on whether the experiment is being observed or not. Observation changes light particles! That’s totally trippy. Photography can also be seen to operate along the same analogous lines: waves and particles. Where analog photography can be viewed as a wavelike system, digital photography can be seen as something closer to a particle system. In other words, “photography, analog and digital, plays with light but depicts the universe with differing assumptions” (Ritchin 178). Ritchin’s comparison in this case seems quite intuitive. Analog would, of course, have wave like qualities (don’t we slosh our prints in the chemical darkroom, as if creating something out of miniature waves?) and the pixel dominated environment of the digital sensor is visually comparable to that of particles, but I have to ask, what if analog images (namely negatives) are translated into digital form, essentially turned into digital pixels—could we then say that analog photography has both the qualities of waves and particles. Perhaps this is a too literal reading of Ritchin’s comparison—and in the end, quantum physics seems to defy something like light from being either wave-like or particle-like and may contain possibilities of existence that are not predictable and change with context, particularly when the element of the “observer” is introduced. What is more valid to me is the idea that digital photography does have this quality of behaving like particles, in the sense that varied and multiple meaning can be extracted from the surface of the digital image. Not only is meaning variable in digital images (analog images have variable meaning as well), but the unpredictability of added and subtracted meaning is possible. In other words, it is hard to predict how particles of information will react when there is the direct intervention of the “observer” which is basically the reader/viewer. In the example of Proust’s grandmother, the analog photograph, with its aura of the static, seems to deplete Proust’s vision of his grandmother to a state that is less than ideal. Ritchin argues that the digital images ability to create “various superimpositions and links” and “a multiplicity of perspectives” would restore Proust’s grandmother to his original ideal, that of a being who is more complex and may retain the fragmentariness that is a quality of our memories which create and recreate our memories of people in a dynamic way. Are we in the era of the post human being? Would we rather be cyborgs than goddesses? Can we live our lives in a constant state of questioning, of probabilities? What happens to the apparent need for continuity in our lives? I am appreciative of the way Ritchin ends his discourse on photography—that both analog and digital are in a “spiral dance” and that both methods of photography should remain in some type of relationship. In the end though, I sense that he is aware of the inevitability of digital photography dominance in a world that is becoming more and more hyper-realistic.
