Sean Cubitt, The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels

Abstract

Look at Ansel Adams’s Frozen Lakes and Cliff – you can find it easily on Google Images, though in each version the image looks slightly different in terms of the lights and the darks. The image comes from a negative that Adams returned to again and again, searching for a better quality print from what he considered to be a poor quality negative. The image, or rather the organization of light embodied in the process of making the print (and the processes now embodied by the variations in the image on your computer screen), forms a large part of the foundation for the argument built in Sean Cubitt’s The Practice of Light, and it is not a bad place to start a review. Photography, as Vilém Flusser saw it, was a way of mathematically organizing the world, of imposing a program onto what he terms the world’s ‘whirring particles’ and producing an image (or a theory).1 In Adams’s negative the light of the Sierra Nevada is organized into an image based on the program of the camera, its settings, Adams’s famous use of the F-stop and his implementation of the zone system. This is what Flusser would focus on. The operation of the cameraman as a functionary of a programmed apparatus, as someone who works for the camera, develops techniques designed to satisfy the camera’s program – like Adams’s sharp focus and measurement of light. But what about after the image has been taken? What about, as Adams’s practice draws to our attention, when it is printed? The technical image produced by the camera, its organization of light, not only points back to the technical function of the camera (which Flusser shows us) but also to the genealogy of print technologies. These are the lines that Cubitt follows, giving us a completely new way to re-evaluate the media theory offered to us by Flusser and the histories of the technical image. Cubitt shows how photography and digital image-making practices are processes that do not simply give us a technical image of the world but instead give us one that is deeply embedded within the history of printmaking and the set of cultural techniques, those relational human, natural and technological processes that were established by the discipline.