thoughts thunk

I guess this is the gist of my thesis in broad terms. I’ve been trying to narrow it down with the whole “reproduction of art” focus, but so much of what I read explodes my thinking out into cultural, visual, and material studies (of which I know nothing).

While I have been thinking about all the ways digital images are different from photographs, along comes Martin Lister in his introductory essay to “The Photographic Image in Digital Culture” explaining how creating the digital/analog dichotomy is too simplistic because cultural conventions and expectations do not suddenly change when faced with a new technology. I think the transition from the scribal form of book production to the printing press is a good example of this. The printers continued many of the conventions of the hand-produced book in the printed book (wide margins for notations, illuminated letters to mark new chapters). The printing press did not re-invent the book…perhaps digital image technology is not re-inventing photography, or at least not in the radical way that some have thought (William Mitchell for one).