현대 사진예술의 쟁점들

Abstract

It is the age of post-photography, referring to the era of electronic photography. Digital photographs can be modified and manipulated any time so they might be false images. A digital photograph can be an index but may morph into an icon. Photographs can be the products of either a virtual world or a fictional imagination. Any post-photographic expression brought about a revolutionary change in artistic photography. The assertion that a photograph is a mark of light is no longer objective. Photographs in the era of post-photography feature a composition of time, a mixture of the past and present, a representation of past memories, a coexistence of two and three dimensions, a coexistence of fragmented history, and the mode of pastiches. A photograph here is nothing but a material for representation. And yet, photography’s realistic ontology is still effective and much more photographs tend to reinforce photography’s realistic aspects. As a result, photography as art comes to have much more diverse forms. We are living in an age of the post-Internet after post-photography. Photography has already been part of art. Artists employ or utilize re- intermediated mediums in accepting information in this post-Internet era. In this era imaging technology has merged with contemporary art. A contemporary metaphor maintains its meaning in a relation incessantly altering like rhizomes. The concept of readymade has still been appropriated, profoundly influenced by the motive and dynamism of the post-Internet environment. The post-Internet is an extensive account of the artistic convention that takes something networked and integrated for granted. As we are living in the era of nonlinear technical images, the material property of marks engendered by photography’s contact with light have disappeared in the digital environment of contemporary art and photography. The everyday in which the virtual is mixed with the real through any in-intermediation and solidarity with time, place, space, and medium. As a real space is connected to a virtual space by the advancement of Internet technology and social networking sites, art materials have turned into something immaterial and any representations force us to perceive a virtual space as a new reality. The medium of photography is given a new status as media art in the deconstruction of genre in the the post-Internet era. Two-dimensional photography is asked to have a three-dimensional perception of space with the progress of technical videos, forging a united front with sculpture and video as an arrangement of time. As photography has become the medium to incarnate all aspects of post-modernism, we realize we have to become the subject to perceive the world, not merely choose time. Both language and expression are altered as the medium changes. We witness the medium of photography enriching art history across the world. The problem of whether photography is art or not is no longer a matter of discussion. It is nothing but a medium. What should be asked again is what we should do with this medium.