Photography Dead?

The thought that photography is dead due to the advent and takeoff of digital imagery, and computer technologies is a bit much. Shankans excerpt from Geoffrey Batchen starting on page 209 goes on to discuss the thoughts of photography and its roll through the rise of technologies, and concepts of photography within those constructs as compared with the culture of the time, and the understanding of perceived reality within the time is a discussion that has continued and will continue at the same pace of the technology that might or will affect the medium or ideology changes. It will never end.

The rise of photography did not kill painting, and though certain materials for analog photography or traditional photography, film are becoming harder to find, it is more of a shift to specialization rather than destruction. Digital imagery or digital photography will not "kill" photography, though part of the issue it seemed in the excerpt was the difference of replication and creation, the counter was given as well, to say that even though the film came from a negative and that is tangible the product or products produced from this labor are still a creation of the photographer, a constructed reality.

Photographs and images are all signs and sometimes symbols of something in reality, or a sign or symbol of a constructed reality, either way it is representation of a personal, cultural, rhetorical, and opinion, of individuals or groups, and even societies. The reality of the argument is the idea of truth or objective truth is lost with generated or constructed images, but this has always been the case, the images have always been constructed the tools are changing yes but the image has always been the construct of one or more of the above mentioned. People who are colorblind see reality in a different way, with the change or absence of color visually recognized by them, yet who is to say the people around them get to force their reality on the colorblind by saying they are wrong, since the world they see is their reality.  The construction of visual reality or reality by man has always happened and will continue, and is seen in all forms and facets of daily human life, we augment reality to fit our own means and ideas of reality why would it be any different with imagery, and it hasn't since cave paintings are not to scale, and the figures are typically skewed or manipulated, displaying a viewed reality seems to be one main point of reality.