Aesthetics in Digital Photography

Conclusion

It is inevitable that in its general effort to objectivize, Science sees a human being as a physical system in the presence of stimuli, which are themselves defined by their physico-chemical properties, and strives to use this as the basis to reconstruct the effective perception and to close the cycle of scientific knowledge by revealing the laws according to which knowledge itself is produced, by creating an objective science of subjectivity. However, it is also inevitable that this attempt will fail.

Maurice MERLEAU-PONTY (1945, p. 33)

How can we approach the relationship between aesthetics and photography today, in the early 21st century, even as photography itself is undergoing a new cycle, one of the most active periods in its short history, due to changes in camera technology and how images are shared?

Let us observe right away that the photographic image is an aesthetic object in its own right and that unlike Bourdieu, 50 years ago, nobody today can deny it a place among the other arts: painting, sculpture, music, etc. By various criteria, photography has not only become an art, but is also one of the most dynamic and widely respected forms of art (Fried 2008; Cotton 2009; Hariman and Lucaites 2016).

Let us also note that much more than other modalities of art, photography lends itself to modern techniques of investigation. One reason for this is that it is easy to store and manipulate on computers, and another is that within a digital society it occupies ...