‘THE PHOTOS (C)HOPPED BODY’
Digital photography and the politics of desire
Bipin Balachandran

When everyone becomes a photographer as what is
happening nowadays, the amateur/professional distinction
becomes blur in photography. Any event can be recorded
and circulated publically. This flood of images has
disrupted the mystiques of the public and private realms
which had been kept mutually exclusive. A taming of the
subversiveness of the camera is observable here. One
who records becomes an ‘inactive witness’ incapable of
intervening the event. What is recorded becomes irrelevant
in the age of digital manipulation. Though the ‘new ability’
of the camera to intrude on private spaces creates certain
anxiety, this is only a transitory anxiety as there is always a
possibility to deny the authenticity of the photograph. When
the presupposition of ‘the presence’ ends photography as a
medium will start experiencing a crisis. The notion of ‘the
presence’ was the founding order of the photography. And
now it fails. What is emerging from this juncture is not a
new version of the old but is a new medium which is being
formed and circulated as an ideological construction.
The founding order of this new medium lies in its ability
to address, shape, regulate and control the fantasy of
the viewer. It is also capable to confront ‘the dissenting
voices’ by playing up its characteristic of inauthenticity.
Thus digitally manipulated photographs become a more
powerful ideological apparatus than language. It is through
a double coding of the binaries such as presence/absence,
authentic/fake that it operates its politics