Digital photography looks much the same as photography as we’ve known it for 180 years and we approach it with similar expectations. But the indexical medium of photography has been replaced with computational processes that throw into question all our assumptions about the image as evidence. Using the historical example of Roger Fenton and Alexander Gardner’s representations of 19th-century war during a time of similar technological transition (then from drawing to photography), it is argued that there is a danger in using the vocabulary of the preceding age to describe the new. The resulting misunderstandings risk distortion of the message, sometimes even denying the truths represented while simultaneously obscuring the emergent qualities and advantageous opportunities offered by the new medium.
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“Truth, the First Casualty”: Versions of this expression have been used for many years to describe how information is distorted during periods of conflict: what we believe we are seeing may not actually be what happened. Samuel Johnson seems to have the earliest attribution with the sentence, “Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages” (Samuel Johnson: The Idler, 1758). Hiram Johnson (1866–1945), a Republican senator in California, might have been the first 20th-century commentator to reference the expression, his actual words being, “The first casualty, when war comes, is truth”, spoken during World War I. |
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