Authorship, Dispersion and the Digital Image

In the previous post titled “Investigating the Digital Image” about the digital image and its implications for photography at large, we dwelled on the contentions of authenticity and its indexical relationship to reality.

Another key concept that has been disrupted by digital modes of photography is that of authorship or originality. Digital images allow for endless iterations or copies to be produced without a necessary loss in quality. Moreover, digital images today are created and circulated within an internet-enabled network of image platforms. Images are easily downloaded, screenshotted, manipulated and re-shared without necessary attribution to an original source or author. Fundamentally, digital image culture obscures the notion of a singular authorship over images and disregards any individual image as original or true, in relation to its copies.

This has radical implications for both media practitioners and artists as well as the marketplace for art. These have functioned using the exclusivity and limitations of an object to generate value. While conversations around appropriation, mass production and piracy have existed before the popularisation of digital media, they have taken centre stage in the present world of largely online interactions and digital consumption, especially in the context of art. Thus, digital image practices are often situated in a networked context of circulation, dispersion and digital viewership, and are actively engaged in conversations around authorship, originality and technological reproduction.

In his essay “Dispersion,” the artist and writer Seth Price addresses these questions around the dispersed art object in the digital world. He says: “With more and more media readily available through this unruly archive (the internet), the task becomes one of packaging, producing, reframing, and distributing; a mode of production analogous not to the creation of material goods, but to the production of social contexts, using existing material.”

While these concerns emerging from the digital image are not exclusive or particular to the South Asian region, they remain pertinent. The global shifts in media culture and vernacular visual cultures are transformed as a result of these local concerns. The subcontinent accounts for some of the largest populations of digital image producers and consumers in the world today. It generates a variety of digital customs, vernacular visual modalities and symbolic references particular to its various communities. From digitally enhanced obituary photographs to political banners edited to resemble holy images, to the use of generic stock photographs in “Good Morning” messages circulated online, the digital image is present in most dimensions of public life in South Asia.

Continuing our investigation into digital images, there will be a series of albums on this platform showcasing projects by artists from the region, further exploring questions opened up by digital photography. These include "Kheti Badi: Chinar Shah's Photographs of her Digital Farm" in the Albums section and "Reframing Generic Images: Old Indian Photos by Nihaal Faizal" in the Stories section.

In case you missed the first part of this series, please search for “Investigating the Digital Image” in the Stories section.