>>2993581that is certainly part of it, there is a profound--some might say ontological--difference between a physically printed image and a digital file displayed on a screen. however the distaste for the practice which I voiced above is founded more on historical and political grounds.
At risk of oversimplifying: The "indiscriminately" indexical and democratizing quality of the first photographs in the 19th century (e.g. the daguerrotype, collodion process, gelatin dry plate) marked the decisive breakdown of the frame's function as an ideological bulwark against changes to or criticisms of the dominant (class-based) social order. The transformation of art effected by photography in this way had to do with the ingress of formerly excluded elements into the representational space sustained by the frame (which photographs afforded). (At least, that's what Walter Benjamin claims.) In other words, less the frame's simple elimination than its sudden, accelerated expansion to encompass all aspects of life, warts and all. However, this move's "emancipatory potential" (that's the shibboleth of pretty much all political commentary on art) depended on the discrete status of the image as an aesthetic object; which is to say, the coherence of its critique depended on the coherence of the bourgeois social institutions it critiqued. (This can be seen in modernist photography's enduring interest in the physical, medium-specific qualities of the photographic image.) [cont...]
