Ectoplasm: Photography in the Digital Age

Batchen’s essay deals with the transformation of photography in the digital age. Ironically, despite being titled “Ectoplasm: Photography in the Digital Age,” the word ectoplasm is neither used nor defined in the essay. To Batchen, photography itself has always been tied with the concept of preservation and death. His description of process of primitive portraits requiring the subject to play dead was reminiscent of the psychoanalytical view of photography as product of the “mummy complex.” Moreover, I find these notions of preservation and death seems to highlight what Batchen cites as one of the primary concerns with digital photography –that photographs may no longer be viewed as indexical evidence for one’s presence or being. However, while others debate the effect of digitization on “image integrity,” Batchen argues that, from its inception, photography has never been free of manipulation. He cites that examples manipulated magazine covers and contends that the mere act of adjusting the lighting and exposure to take a photograph challenges the photographic film’s indexical fidelity. It seems to me then that the efforts of artists ranging from Cindy Sherman to Lorna Simpson serve a similar function as digital photography by questioning our presumptions of photographs and truth. Despite being heralded as an objective medium free from human involvement (pencil of nature) and thus accurate account of reality, photographs have been shown by artists and now the photographic medium itself to be simply an unreliable method of preservation. In his essay, Batchen actively tries to undermine this notion of photography as a accurate reflection of truth. He describes photography as more something that is more akin to a network of indexes a collection of ghosts. While looking up “ectoplasm” on the internet, I found it interesting that digital photographs often listed as evidence of its existence along with text that offer scientific explanations to the optical effect. It then seems that photographs (especially digital photographs) are in many ways analogous to ectoplasm united by their existence as things that are both physical and the supernatural and their ability to incite controversy.