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Popular Culture Review
“real” (In Robins 154). Such a concern clearly reiterates Baudrillard’s critique of
the hyperreal and what Celia Lury defines as “the ambition of the signifier to
replace or reincarnate the thing it represents” (5). Baudrillard, she claims, radically
proposes that “prosthesis does not simply modify the body, but is being imposed
as the ‘original’ model of which the individual is a copy” (226).-^ Likewise, Kevin
Robins holds that “Through techniques of electronic montage and manipulation,
what we once trusted as pictures of reahty can now be edited and altered seamlessly
and undetectably” (156).
In the remaining part of this paper, it is to the ethical effects of this problem
that I would hke to (re)tum. As Ceha Lury makes exphcit in her book Prosthetic
Culture (1998), photography and CGI represent and entail different ways of seeing,
founded on and required by the ontological specificity of each image-yielding
practice (3). On a similar note, Robins worries that postphotography will alter “the
epistemological structure” of our culture (156). The digital forgery of “real space”
is troublesome not only because it can take on the appearance of the photograph
and thus deceive the viewer who sees it as an index rather than as a simulation, but
also because it by its very nature promotes an additional negation. I have already
made a reference to this above, but the subject merits further attention. Toward the
end of her book, Lury speculates that the production of digital imagery “adds to
the persuasiveness of a notion of utopia, the perfect future, as the past perfected”
(219). In embracing this aesthetic of artificially transforming the appearance of
the real, postphotography abnegates the particular - the individual manifestation
of a phenomenon - in favor of the manufactured ideal. As Baudrillard discerns, the
copy indeed becomes the model, one whose utopian perfection meretriciously
entices the beholder to rehnquish individuahty. The eradication of difference imphcit
in the cosmaesthetics of postphotography is therefore ethically dubious also for
this reason. Film surgery represents the inverse of Bazinian sensibihty, for as
Matthews promulgates, for this theorist “both photography and its spawn, the motion
picture, have a special obUgation toward reahty. Their principal responsibility is
to document the world before attempting to interpret or criticize it. For Bazin, this
duty is ultimately a sacred one” (emphasis added, 23).
Toward the end of Camera Lucida, Barth es intimates that he does not consider
photography as art, but that in the cases in which it does in fact become an art, its
noeme - its essence - is forfeited (117). Perhaps it is this uneasy duahty that prompts
Estelle Jussim to define photography not as a thing but as a method (86), one
which Mary Price summarizes when she writes that “This is the factuahty of the
photograph. The photograph authenticates the objects. The objects authenticate
the photograph” (175). In stark opposition to this function, the techniques of
postphotography, like cosmetic surgery, work to discredit rather than authenticate
the object. In her book Venus Envy (1997), Ehzabeth Haiken charts the evolution