Technology and Terminology: Analog, Digital, and Analogo-Digital Photography

With the rise of digital photographic practices in the 1990s an intense scholarly discussion set in, prompted by the need to come to terms with, to understand, and to label a new technology. An early and frequently cited touchstone in this context is William J. Mitchell's (1992) book-length study The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era. Published at the onset of digital image processing as a widespread practice, The Reconfigured Eye bestows great enthusiasm on a still-nascent technology and is to no small extent concerned with technological exegesis and the practical details of computer-based image production. The book's main focus, however, is on the future of photography and its claim to documentary verification in an increasingly digital environment. One of the many merits of Mitchell's study is that it systematically lays out the differences between old and new technologies of image-making. The author frames analog photography and digital imagery in terms of a dichotomy. He speaks, for instance, of a “basic technical distinction between analog (continuous) and digital (discrete) representations” (4).