I like this essay because it poses the photograph as record of something that existed. Nothing more, nothing less. And perhaps that is one reason that I find myself so drawn to film. You're creating a record of something that existed in the real world. With digital photography and photoshop, you can piece things together and easily create things that never existed in the real world. But with film, if you want to play a trick, you have to make the trick exist. George Melies and his magic tricks, he had to create them in real life. Now we can computer generate anything we want, and it makes everything less exciting. Maybe that's why magician acts and elaborate makeup are still exciting. We know that they're not real things, but we don't know exactly how they came to be, and so it's fascinating and exciting.
I guess this reading just made me realize how disappointed I am with digital media. We can't trust images anymore, which is what Barthes was so excited about.
"Impotent with regard to general ideas (to fiction), its force is nonetheless superior to everything the human
mind can or can have conceived to assure us of reality-but also this reality is never anything but a contingency"
We've now lost that in a way, which brings me a kind of sadness.
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