Some time ago at the National Library of Scotland there was a beautiful and substantial show of the work of the pioneering Scottish photographer John Thomson, who toured china in the 1860 and 70s. Thomson, like many photographers of his time, used the wet collodion process, which necessitates making negatives on location for the moment of the shoot. Most clearly, I remember the portraits of princes, and other aristocrats and one landscape in particular. The image was of a large wall with an embattlement and a figure blurred through motion is hurling something, then towards Thomson and now, a century later, towards the viewer. An event which probably didn't take place then coalesces in the mercury vapour negative because, unlike the other negatives in the exhibition, this one was shattered into 3 or 4 pieces, and it reads as if the projectile actually hit its mark.

What this exhibitions means to be me now, more-or-less a decade later, steeped in realm of digital photography is quite different from then. Now, I see a great deal of reflection in the idea of the photographer that is emerging now. Almost all film photographers complain - and not unreasonably - that their work load has increased drastically and their pay decreased. Previously photographers would shoot images, send them to be developed, make some contact prints for their client, and then later either print the imagery themselves or have somebody else do it. Now, the market insists that the photographer shoots themselves, and either converts the RAW images, or then send them (the digital equivalent of giving away negatives). This means either (but usually both) a loss of income and greater time involvement, plus a massive investment in digital skills and digital craftsmanship (which isn't the reason a lot of photographers picked up cameras to begin with) and financially through the expenses of a good digital set-up.

This is very similar to the idea of the photographer that John Thomson was. Not only an image maker, but a chemist, pack horse, and printer. Not only this but exposure times have gone up and image quality has dropped (hopefully temporarily) - as did with the advent with advent of early film.

Viewed from this perspective our connection to the C19th. seems stronger than ever. Not only through the technical matters and through the change of photographic practices but also through the basic role of photography. Photography - it can be seen and demonstrated - fits into the C19th. model of knowledge and the growth thought in objectivity. The practice of photography offered a metaphor for a promised-land that lacked the vagaries of subjectivity, of emotional politiking, and brought knowledge under the judicial hammer of independent measurable quantities and qualities. Of, course this promise has been both incredibly successful and is the keystone of m-lC19th. and C20th. cultural paradigms and persists today in the majority of fields. However, for the last 30-40 years there have been different notions of knowledge that have been steadily growing, and ironically maturing through the greatest success of the C19th worldview - the computer.

Computers, in many ways, embody the successes of objective knowledge - everything a computer does has to be quantified and encoded in some syntactically strict format. Computers are the philospher's stone, knowledge is dissolved, separated from the material world, into its pure elemental form, where it can be transmogrified endlessly. Computers obviously do not transmogrify anything, but they do model. This process of creating worlds within themselves that replicate 'real world' behaviour becomes a mode of thinking where the model of, a simulation of, the world. The notion of simulation is an epistemology.

Within photography we've seen this transformation from the C19th idea of knowledge as visible to the visible being the end result of the process of knowledge. This is a little contentious, but in many ways contemporary CG imagery is closer to the spirit of C19th photography than current photography. At its best - which it seldom is - computer graphics (CG) is a way of modelling a possible world, not necessarily a world that does exist but a quantum alternative, a 'maybe', or a 'could be'. The rendered imagery in the CG case is the end result of a model of the world, and its an increasingly sophisticated model which draws upon successes in high level sciences as well as from cultural arenas.

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To step back a moment, the digital photographer eternally trapsing the earth with their darkroom upon their back - or rather on their lap (as more sales migrate to laptops away from desktops) - is a return to the C19th model of the photographer, to a form of renaissance in photography at its beginning. This photographer does not create their image in the camera but only cultivates it there, creates a framework of their thinking that delineates, and prunes an infiinity of possible images but leaves open an infinity also, in the darkroom. Sarah Kember once said something to the effect of that it wasn't that digital photography has created the ambiguities in the photograph but has just highlighted that which was always present. And in this regard with the motion towards the photographer as darkroom magician the openness of the (now digital) negative has revealed itself once again and the paradigm of knowledge that the photograph constitutes is opened up again, calling the photographer, viewers and contexts to discuss any and every images meaning without dissolving into final meaning. With CG modelling reality the paradigm of knowledge has also shifted away from the visual as knowledge to the visual representing a modelled knowledge.

Both of these shifts away from C20th notions in photography and draw mostly upon the C19th and the C21st. What they are moving towards has been suggested but I'm not certain with these thinking-outlouds what might be.

(conside this to be a draft - I'll return later)