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Still, there is something of interest for us in sticking to photographic tradition that is beyond historical nostalgia and the ideals of pedagogy: that is how the drawn-out process of accomplishing the image, culminating in the work of photographic development and its ritualistic bathings, builds up a momentum of expectancy that indexes the photographer’s desire to see the image. Here, memories may resurface of that first photograph having come into sight in the darkroom. On the other hand, whose memory could recall the first digitally processed photograph?
Time was that photographers had to wait for their images. Then, photographers took images that they, in fact, could not verify. Taking an image revealed to them, first of all, nothing. All they could see was the images they had imagined to see. What the photographer captured remained just that: captured. For hours, days, weeks… Impressed on film, plates or other light-sensitive matter, the photographic image would affirm itself only after some time. In the meantime, however, it was hidden, invisible, latent. Digitized photography, on the other hand, has compressed the course of the image’s emergence into instances of seconds and less. Indeed, thanks to real-time rendering, the taking of a photograph is itself based on an already displayed image, presenting the image to be taken as image. Even now, the act of taking an image has been profoundly reconfigured, from a practice that geometrically frames the subject through the viewfinder to a practice that points out the subject through the intensities of the images on display. Whereas digitized photography may no longer perceptibly suspend the image in latency between its capture and development, effects of latency come to bear in the digital storing of the image and the moment of its visualization. Latency has not, therefore, been dispensed with in digitized photography. The immediacy of digitally stored images and their potential visualizability may be customarily assumed just as information technology may promise us its reliability, yet in actuality the visual reconstitution of the image should not be taken for granted.
Regardless of the ways in which the photographic image becomes suspended in latency, it is its suspension that allows us to think about the extent to which the photographer is invested – economically and libidinally – in the emergence of the image.
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