“In any case, if most viewers can’t tell whether pictures were taken with analogue or digital cameras, who cares if film fades? Whatever photographers use, their goal is no longer taking pictures but showing how their work is not painting, cinema, sculpture or any other medium. The negative is no longer a square of film: it’s a question of survival.”

This quote is the closing paragraph of Jennifer Allen’s essay Long Exposure in Frieze Magazine. As I was reading the essay, I kept wondering if the questions she was asking weren’t at odds to something she wasn’t discussing: is photography as a physical medium different than it’s digital incarnation? Are we seeing a new medium form? Analogue photography (and I would include printed photographs produced in the digital dakroom here) is a physical medium. Once it is translated onto the screen, it is something different. Just as a photo-realistic painting functions differently than a photograph, so too does a digital photograph on screen function differently. Is there more than one photography? Is what Allen is talking about the fitful defining of a new medium, much as video art worked to define itself as separate from cinema.

As a photographer working with both analogue and digital cameras, I still work in a primarily analogue way. I make photographs and present them in physical forms. How does digital a digital origin change this? It doesn’t. In a similar vein, if I digitized an image from film and embedded it with audio files or turn it into a hyperlink, then I’m engaging in a different kind of medium; one that is partly photography, but partly something else.

Allen’s assertions that the technological advances of cameras changes the medium, is valid but weak. Photographers have long been editors. Anyone who photographed in the PD (pre-digital) era, particularly those shooting smaller formats, selected their best images from amongst many. Winogrand is an extreme example of this. Just because one’s camera can shoot many more continuous frames without needing a new roll of film or memory card doesn’t make this selection process any more important–if one is making prints.

What does matter is the way that the images are used. When these digital images are used in a way that are uniquely digital, that can only be accomplished through interacting with a computer, then we are finding something new. Simply replicating the white wall of a gallery or the turning pages of a magazine in a website isn’t enough. When the viewer can interact and make choices, when audio and video enrich the experience then we are looking at something new. There may be precedent in analogue PD era, but it was still film becoming physical prints.

I’m heading to a wedding in Puerto Rico next week. My intention had been to bring a beat up polaroid camera and shoot instant pictures during the trip. Now, I’m definitely going to do so. My photographic practice isn’t fighting for survival and is clearly not any other medium. That is not to say that my digital practice isn’t seeking new directions, new alliances and new opportunities.