Photoshop Semiotics

Self Portrait at Buchenwald:It's the Real Thing by Alan Shcechner

What might appear to be a confusing article title turns out to be interesting idea. For the authors verbiage might be the flavor of the day in this piece, but from what I can gather, it attempts to describe how our understanding of the photographic image has changed since the advent of the computer age. In this case, the 'semiotics' part is not specifically about language, but what we interpret as symbols in in computer manipulated photographic images.

Considering the private/personal associations of photography, the narrative possibilities of photographic manipulation as well as possible archaeological implications therein, the article discusses how the photograph as document is rendered dubious in light of current technology. They make an important distinction between the, "science of the semiotic and the poetry/philosophy of the hermeneutic" with which they propose to discover, "how manipulated images can introduce a productive uncertainty as knowledge". In principle this is an excellent idea and may be just what we need to sort out the entanglement photography and computers can become.