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Because the method of production using technological tools substantially changes the environment in the art studio, tension builds between the method of production and art studio norms, and the illusion that new production tools create new art forms is generated. For example, in a traditional photography art studio, artists work in a darkroom, use a variety of wet chemicals that require attention to time and temperature, and employ traditional, hands-on techniques to manipulate the final print with regard to contrast, focus, and value. When a photographer chooses digital tools, however, there is no darkroom, no wet chemicals, and no hands-on techniques for manipulating the final print. Is the outcome a photograph? Or is it digital art?

Walter Benjamin in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction appears to argue that the use of a lens in either traditional or digital photography creates a much different kind of image than can be created through drawing or painting. He writes: “a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye—if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man . . . the camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.” (238-9) Further, he claims, “The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law.” (235-6)

Using this approach—distinguishing what kinds of pictures are made through the use of specific production processes, rather than simply focusing on the production process—requires an acceptance of both the digital image and the traditional photographic image as photographs. Although some might argue for the distinctiveness of the light-sensitive technologies of traditional photography, Benjamin’s analysis focuses on the use of the lens, or capturing an image, be it onto film or into electrical impulses, that makes the particular kind of picture that functions as a photograph.

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