Digital photographs are data. Inside the digital camera light, the image, is transferred into the universal language of code, binary logic, and information. This information could be output as a sound file or a string of numbers, but in a digital camera an algorithm translates this data and decides how an image is formed.(1) There is another data in the digital image, auxiliary data, a world of technical, metaphysical, chronological, and geographical data that seek to add legitimacy and traceability to the image. Augmentations like ‘location’ and ‘time’ lend the image a sense of legitimacy in relation to what it depicts. This data attempts to smooth over the photograph’s absurd time stillness and resultant disconnection from time, to reconfirm that the photograph does have a specific relationship to specific human experienced time, to situate the digital image as continuum. This, in name, is ‘metadata’. Metadata alludes both to an image centric perception, the idea that these recordings are metatextual to the singular image, and metadata’s nature as imposed text.

 

One of the key investigations into The Abu Ghraib conducted by the US Army used metadata from photographs as a cornerstone.(2) Photographs taken at Abu Ghraib were collated into a timeline of individual, location, and time. Brent Pack, the investigator appointed by the US army, was an expert in forensics, not photographs.(3) In creating a metadata based timeline of images at Abu Ghraib, Pack imposes a narrative on the images; an imposed temporality that stratifies rather than clarifies.(4) Pack wholeheartedly accepts the image’s code as truthful and useful. He then uses the images themselves and their metadata as a code, a decipher to the torture at Abu Ghraib. Here the image is variously coded and code but this acceptance of the rationale of digital images serves to delete the image itself. The investigation became about plotting soldiers’ movements through the prison as if they were moving and torturing independently, and it was by chance that they were photographing. The metadata serves as a censor of the image itself, a blackout by the situation of images in a timeline, of the very difficult questions they ask. 

 

This is emblematic of a constant tension when engaging with or talking about the digital image; a simultaneous demand to look at the new and complex expanded categories that surround the image and an equally pressing necessity not to let the image itself be forgotten or subsumed. To at all times look at the image too, even when those images are desperate to pass by and through unnoticed. 

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The networked image is a mass; an unimaginable quantity of photographs on the internet. Within infinite photographs, yottabytes of data, it is imaginatively impossible that a single image can exist. An image uploaded into this mass of images is so small in comparison to the whole that statistically or perceptibly the image borders a line of unreality, of complete nonexistence, of nano-death. The more images we produce, the less possible it becomes to produce a single image that exists in itself.

 

Within this mass, it follows logically that a human eye never sees almost all images uploaded to the internet after the point of uploading. They are glanced at from the inside by search engine crawlers, by image scraping algorithms, and are seen only by the machine. In the machine's eye, the algorithm, photographs are never seen visually and only ever exist as code. The digital image has become a parthenogen, a self-propagator. It has undergone a re-purification and returned to its naked state of pure data waiting in anticipation to be translated by the camera into an image recognisable by humans. The digital photograph has finally hidden itself from us by multiplying and turning inside out. 

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A photograph, as far as we may define it now, only exists when accessed, when recalled from the ether and materialised. Even when the image is rematerialised in front of us, it is very rarely static as we scroll thorough various photo feeds images exists in fast upward or downward motion. 

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Photographs are performed by screens for us and as such are durational. Physical photographs continue to exist when we look away. A digital photograph in an environment of mass networked images stops existing as a photograph when we turn off our phone screen or scroll further through the feed. Its code remains but it has to be rematerialised, retranslated, and mirroring the function of the digital camera, recaptured, if we want to see it again.