7 Photography's transformation in the digital age

Artistic and everyday forms

Mark Durden

 

Photography has been unquestionably transformed by digital technology. As Martin Hand has recently noted, ‘we are witnessing the death of film…in terms of the disappearance of film manufacturing and processing, the production of film cameras, the availability of darkrooms, and the use of film in anything other than specialist domains or niche communities of practice’ (Hand 2012: 2). But at the same time photography is proliferating. More people than ever before now take photographs. The photo-sharing site Flickr, for example, hosts more than 5 billion images, with 560 million images uploaded in 2011 alone (Flickr 2012). This chapter looks at the shifting ...

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