17.1: Photography after the Digital Turn

The twenty-first century did not simply continue the digital turn in photography. It normalized it. By the early 2000s, digital imaging was no longer a strange new technology or a specialized professional tool. It had become the ordinary condition of photographic life. Cameras were no longer only separate objects carried for specific occasions; they were absorbed into phones, laptops, tablets, security systems, satellites, medical devices, drones, and social media platforms. Photography became less an isolated act of picture-making and more a constant feature of contemporary experience.

This shift changed not only how photographs were made, but how they functioned. A photograph could still be printed, framed, collected, and exhibited, but it could also be uploaded, filtered, screenshotted, reposted, tagged, archived, compressed, searched, surveilled, manipulated, or used as data. The photograph became both image and information. It could serve as personal memory, political evidence, social performance, advertising tool, family record, police document, historical archive, or algorithmic input. In this sense, twenty-first-century photography is not one thing. It is a network of practices.

Earlier chapters may have treated digital photography as a rupture: a shift from film to data, from darkroom to software, from chemical trace to electronic file. This chapter asks what happens after that rupture becomes everyday reality. Once digital photography is no longer new, the central question changes. It is no longer simply, “Is digital photography still photography?” Instead, the more urgent question becomes: what does photography do now?

It circulates through social media, where images help shape political movements, public grief, misinformation, celebrity, activism, and identity. It lives in cloud storage, where personal archives appear infinite but remain vulnerable to technological failure, corporate control, and digital disappearance. It appears in museum installations, where artists stretch photography beyond the framed print and into space, sound, text, performance, and sculpture. It operates through surveillance systems and machine vision, where images are not always made for human eyes but for systems designed to classify, track, and predict behavior. At the same time, many artists have returned to historical processes, handmade materials, and slow photographic methods as a way of resisting the speed and immateriality of digital culture.

This return to older methods is not simply nostalgia. In the twenty-first century, the old often becomes newly urgent. Processes such as cyanotype, tintype, daguerreotype, wet plate collodion, photograms, and chlorophyll printing allow contemporary artists to think about time, touch, decay, memory, and the physical life of images. These practices remind us that photography has always been more than a camera. From its earliest history, photography emerged from the desire to use light to preserve presence, reproduce likeness, and hold onto the passing world. In the twenty-first century, that desire remains, but it is complicated by the overwhelming abundance of images and the instability of the systems that contain them.

Binh Danh’s work offers a particularly useful lens through which to understand this tension between photographic speed and photographic memory. In a culture where images are often made instantly, circulated rapidly, and forgotten almost as quickly, Danh turns to slow, fragile, light-based processes that insist on duration. His chlorophyll prints use leaves, sunlight, and photographic imagery to address memory, war, loss, and historical inheritance. These works are not quick images made for immediate circulation. They are material encounters with the past, formed through time and dependent on organic surfaces. The leaf becomes both image support and living metaphor: a surface that receives light, carries history, and remains vulnerable to decay. In a chapter concerned with screens, social media, algorithms, and image overload, Danh’s practice reminds us that photography is still bound to time, light, bodies, and mortality.

To understand photography in the twenty-first century, then, we must move across several overlapping territories. We must consider the smartphone and the social media feed, but also the handmade print and the revived historical process. We must examine photography as political witness, but also as surveillance and data. We must look at contemporary portraiture as a space of identity and self-fashioning, while also asking how archives preserve some histories and erase others. We must consider photography’s role in climate crisis, protest culture, global image circulation, and the expanding field of contemporary art.

The twenty-first century did not make photography disappear into digital life. It made photography harder to define — and more necessary to study. Its power now lies not in a single claim to truth, but in its ability to move between evidence and fiction, memory and performance, intimacy and spectacle, material object and networked image. Photography remains one of the primary ways contemporary culture sees itself, argues with itself, remembers itself, and imagines what might still be possible.

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