Programming Light: The Processing and performance of digital photographs

It is sometimes assumed a photograph is made in the split second a camera’s shutter is opened to allow light to strike the photosensitive surface within. Yet, as anyone who has ever worked in a darkroom can attest, the moment of exposure is only the first step in a complex string of operations, the culmination of which is the photographic print. It is in the darkroom Greg Hainge (2008) locates a performative aspect to photographers’ practice: the printer handles their prints, dodging, burning, and toning until they achieve their desired result. The analogue photograph, he suggests, is never ‘finished’ until the development process has been arrested by the chemical ‘fix’. If we substitute ‘darkroom’ for ‘computer’ much of this argument still applies to the digital photograph, save, I suggest, for the ‘fix’: for as long as the digital photograph remains on a computer, the ‘fix’ is only ever temporary, and the photograph always open to further processing. This further means that when photographs are displayed on a screen, this performative aspect of photography can be extended into the public space of the gallery. Drawing on my work combining digital photography, data, and custom software programs, in this essay I consider code as an ‘illocutionary speech act’ (2005), a form of writing in which saying and doing come together; in this case to perform processing operations on a digital photograph. Using two of my own recent works as examples, I explore how artists and photographers can – by employing bespoke computer programs – exploit the ‘unfixed’ nature of the digital photograph and continue to ‘process’, or perform, the photograph throughout its exhibition. In doing so, I propose these works come to not only evoke some of the many possible iterations of a photograph arising from the same moment of exposure, but potentially create new relationships with those referents depicted. References Arns, I. (2005) 'Code as performative speech act,' Artnodes 4. Available at: http://www.uoc.edu/artnodes/espai/eng/art/arns0505.pdf (accessed 22 February 2017). Hainge, G. (2008) 'Unfixing the photographic image: Photography, indexicality, fidelity and normativity,' Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 5 (22), pp. 715 – 730