4. Solutions

"Fixing” the malleable document:

From a structural point of view the digital environment makes every document potentially much more malleable, even giving the appearance of malleability when nothing has been changed. As a first step, even when the conventional photograph (the photographer’s interpretive, non-manipulated image) is to be invoked as part of the multi-media environment it makes sense that a label be appended to the photograph describing what kind of image it is. A committee that I headed at New York University proposed the icon of a lens (a circle inside a square), whereas a composited, retouched or computer-generated image that simulates the conventional photograph should be presented with a “not-a-lens-icon” (a lens icon with a diagonal slash going through it) so that the simulation of the previous medium (analog photography) is no longer a deceptive option. When photographs are set up to make a point, whether controlled by subject or photographer, mention in the caption should be made as well. The idea is to inform the reader what photographic strategy is being used so that it is easier to know how to read the image.

Otherwise, the photographer might want to investigate the “non-fixed” photograph. For example, Mexican photographer Pedro Meyer argues that the compositing of different image fragments to make one photographic-like image can be an effective documentary strategy, much like writers synthesize paragraphs from various sources. Certainly this kind of “photography” should be quite rewarding for those no longer interested in being confined by the temporal and spatial constraints of conventional photography. For example, the fragments that form the image could themselves be links back to the original photographs or other sources from which they came, allowing the synthesized image to serve as a summary of the various inputs and gateway back to them. The reader should simply be told that what they are seeing is a new strategy, not conventional photography.