At that time, my impression was that I'd addressed those questions only briefly and rarely, usually too little and too late. After following his suggestion, the experience of looking at everything I'd published and -- in interviews, panel discussions and public lectures -- said on this subject made it clear that at least I hadn't just stepped out for a beer during the early days of the digital evolution, and that both a development and a continuity of thought on these matters emerged from my recurrent ruminations, jeremiads and prophecies on this nexus of issues. This book is the result.

When I began writing about photography, in 1967, the battle over that medium's status as one in which art (whatever that might be) could be produced was still raging. Computers -- large, noisy, mysterious machines with functions then limited almost exclusively to the mathematical -- were a class of objects few lay people had laid eyes on, much less operated. The prophecy that they would transform our communications systems and pervade our everyday lives had been promulgated by only a few visionaries; to my knowledge, no one had hazarded a guess that anything anyone might ever consider as art would emerge from this technology.

A few pockets of resistance defended by diehard reactionaries aside, the battle for photography's recognition as a legitimate medium for the making of art -- by which I mean a medium accessible to the mark of the mind and viable for the concerns of the poet -- ended long ago. I'd estimate that it was widely understood as won at the height of the so-called "photo boom," circa 1975 – less than a decade after I first wrote down my thoughts about the emergent computer technology. Today, just shy of three decades from the point at which I joined that earlier struggle, photography stands permanently ensconced in the pantheon of the arts, while a multitude of works generated via computer and proposing themselves as art present themselves for our consideration; and, both appropriately and ironically, photography's shifting of the ground rules for acceptance into the territory of art serves as the most frequent analogue in the debate over the claims for the existence (actual or eventual) of "computer art."¹

The writings, speeches and dialogic comments (extracts from a panel discussion and three interviews) collected here engage that argument, and, as the reader will soon see, pursue that analogue. However, just as the question of photography-as-art constituted only a subset of my more encompassing interest in the myriad ways that lens-based communications technologies reshaped the world, so my concern with computer art as such began as and remains subordinate to my concern with the fact that we have made the computer into what J. David Bolter calls a "defining technology"² of first-world culture. I find it intriguing that this manifests itself even more clearly in my writing on matters electronic than it does in my photography-specific texts. For many years, I have seen our cultural relationship to these two technologies as interrelated. I have also taken it for granted all along that efforts to gerrymander computer-generated work out of the territory of the arts would prove not only retrograde but futile, and certainly unworthy of prolonged attention.

The earliest public speculations I made on these subjects were published over thirty years ago, in September of 1967. They appeared in the very first essay I published in the Village Voice, the essay with which I began my career as a working writer – a response to an LP record by Marshall McLuhan, with which this book’s Prologue opens. I did not find occasion to return to the subject until April of 1973, when I embedded some of my concerns in a short review of what we'd now call fax art by William Larson.³ These were followed, a year later, by a set of what now strike me as a handful of crudely formulated and elementary questions regarding so-called "generative systems" that arose in response to some work by Keith Smith and Sonia Sheridan I reviewed for the New York Times that summer.⁴ Those, in turn, were succeeded by comments provoked by a controversy I’d observed within the Society for Photographic Education; drafted in late 1975, they appeared in an issue of Camera 35 dated February-March, 1976, incorporated into an essay considering a proposed shift in emphasis for the S.P.E.⁵

Those concerns, and some others, were treated more expansively in "Remember: The Seduction of Narcissus was Visual," the essay from that same year that opens the main body of this collection and strikes its keynote. These problematic issues had begun to nag at me, as the reader will see. I came back to them in a 1977 book review. In 1978 I had the opportunity to address the Society for Photographic Education's membership as a whole, and used the occasion to synopsize my anticipation and anxiety concerning the emerging technologies, as well as to urge my colleagues' attention to them.⁶ By then they'd become a cause for chronic meditation on my part, as this book reveals.

In 1978 I also had my first direct encounter with digital imaging: in a Times Square T-shirt emporium, I commissioned a full-face digital portrait of myself. It cost $5. It ended up as the front- and back-cover image for my first collection of essays⁷ -- making me, so I'm told, the only author in the history of the world's oldest university press to have his picture on the jacket of his book.
Meanwhile, I continued to poke at and pry into these matters, simply as a concerned citizen and an interested onlooker. I developed no theoretical expertise, nor, for the first decade-plus, had any revelatory hands-on experience (though, as recounted elsewhere in this volume,⁸ I did begin to use the computer for my work as a writer, in mid-1987). The sources for my information were commonly available and anything but obscure: the mass media -- TV, radio, daily papers and the popular press -- and assorted books by Seymour Papert, Joseph Weizenbaum, Sherry Turkle and others, for the most part written for non-specialists in the field. Just keeping my ear to the ground in this fashion made the future, in this regard, seem inescapable. In late 1986, even before I began working on a computer myself, I learned that Lens' On Campus -- for which I then wrote a column -- was on the verge of being purchased by another publisher; I persuaded editor-in-chief Barry Tanenbaum and the new owners that photo teachers and students, the magazine’s primary readership, were thenceforth headed down the digital path, with no turning back, and that the periodical’s new incarnation should speak to that transition and reflect it in its name. At my urging, they changed the periodical's title to Imaging On Campus, positioning it nicely to catch and ride the crest of that wave. (Unfortunately, that didn’t prevent its demise for other reasons, just a year later.⁹ )

In the spring of 1988, Michael Recht of Syracuse University's Department of Art/Media Studies invited me to give a lecture to their students that he indicated would be a valedictory of sorts, and asked me to rethink and update that keynote address I'd delivered to the Society for Photographic Education just over a decade previously. Here's an excerpt from the resulting speech:

. . . Reviewing that talk and the ten years since it was delivered brought up quite a jumble -- thoughts, emotions, memories, guesses. I'm going to present these to you as a kind of patchwork or collage, random thoughts in a dry time. If you'll accept a spoken version of the cubist idea that one way to apprehend something is to build up a montage of glimpses from different vantage points, perhaps we'll all find that some sense of the present and future emerges from these fragments.

Reviewing one's prophecies is always a sobering experience. The questions one asks are not only "When was I right?" and "When was I wrong?" but, perhaps most painfully, "Where did I miss the boat entirely?"

So I was grateful to discover that I hadn't made too much of a fool of myself. True, I'd projected that a popular, accessible form of holography (or some alternative three-dimensional imaging process) would be introduced, with the result that 3-D imagery would swiftly begin to replace the still-standard two-dimensional forms. As someone said during a symposium in which I took part recently, holography seems to be the ever-receding horizon of new photographic technology -- always in sight, never within reach. At least not yet, in any case.

Conversely, I was perhaps too timid in my anticipation of the impact of electronic imaging and its pervasion of the field of visual communication. While I cautioned photography teachers to prepare for students using electronic cameras, and projected a communications environment in which image manipulation increased rapidly, I'd no idea that a mere decade later the Scitex machine and other such devices would be accomplished facts, and that photography education would have fallen almost hopelessly behind and be scrambling to catch up with the onslaught of these new technologies.¹⁰

If reviewing the prophecies in a single decade-old jeremiad sobers one, looking back over two decades' worth of auguries is daunting. Yet, on balance, I'm not especially embarrassed, even by my mistakes. (Where is that digital equivalent of holography for which we're all presumably waiting breathlessly? Well, Virtual Reality seems a likely candidate for the job.) For every mark or two missed, there's an anticipation that proved out. Beyond that, many of the questions I asked seem to me to have headed in the right directions, even when my provisional answers turned out wrong.

Aside from some minor repairs and endnoting, I have left these essays unchanged; part of their value in their original form, I hope, is the way in which, separately and collectively, they capture my approach to worrying this particular complex of concerns across a sequence of given moments.¹¹ Because they appeared over a long span of time, in a wide range of publications with diverse readerships, and were not written with the expectation of ever assembling them into a book, variations on certain key passages recur in several of them. I consider those integral to the specific argument of each essay, in most cases; beyond that, they indicate something about my own working method that I hope may prove useful. So I've chosen not to delete those reiterations, instead leaving the essays largely as they were written and published. I beg the reader's indulgence for the consequent repetition.

The dates appended parenthetically to the ends of these essays, lectures and interviews are the dates not of their writing but of their initial publication or (in the case of lectures) the occasions of their original delivery and (with interviews) the dates on which they took place. Because the chronologically first of these essays – “Flowering Paradox: McLuhan/Newark,” "Two Extremes," "Of Snapshots and Mechanizations" and "Begging the Issue" -- broach the subject either fragmentarily or else within the comparatively narrow frameworks of, respectively, fax art, electrostatic art-making and photography education, I've chosen to identify them as constituting a "Prologue" to this collection; "Remember: The Seduction of Narcissus Was Visual," written some years later, strikes me as a broader, more appropriate opener. Nonetheless, the material herein is presented in strictly chronological order, according to the month and year in which (as indicated at each selection's end, and/or in the credits) the core version of each essay was first published, the lecture was presented, or the interview/panel discussion conducted. (In cases where a piece's publication history needs more elaboration, that's indicated in the endnotes.)

This should make it clear that the "digital evolution" of the book's title refers not only to metamorphoses in the technology but to changes within me as well. What you'll find in these pages constitutes a modest, extremely personal and highly idiosyncratic contribution, from my decidedly lay perspective, to an ongoing public debate over issues that have already transformed our culture, and will continue to do so. At the same time, it reflects an internal argument with myself, between my conservative and radical aspects, my conflictual yearnings for both the comfort of the familiar and the adventure of the unknown. Neither of those forums, the public or the private, seems likely to achieve consensus in the foreseeable future. Apparently, in both cases, I like it that way.

-- A. D. Coleman
Staten Island, New York
June 1998

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¹ In a special issue of Time magazine concerned with the "cyberrevolution," a report on controversy over computer-generated art concludes, "It is not for the first time. In 1902, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and other now venerated American photographers formed a group devoted to convincing doubters that photography was a worthy form of artistic expression. That goal took decades to achieve." See Bellafante, Ginia, "Strange Sounds and Sights," Time, Vol. 145, no. 12, Spring 1995, p. 16.

² "A defining technology develops links, metaphorical or otherwise, with a culture's science, philosophy, or literature; it is always available to serve as a metaphor, example, model, or symbol. A defining technology resembles a magnifying glass, which collects and focuses seemingly disparate ideas in a culture into one bright, sometimes piercing ray. Technology does not call forth major cultural changes by itself, but it does bring ideas into a new focus by explaining or exemplifying them in new ways to larger audiences." Bolter, J. David, Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), p. 11.

³ See “Two Extremes,” elsewhere in this volume.

⁴ See “Of Snapshots and Mechanizations,” elsewhere in this volume.

⁵ See "Begging the Issue," elsewhere in this volume.

⁶ "No Future for You? Speculations on the Next Decade in Photography Education," in Light Readings: A Photography Critic's Writings, 1968-1978 (Oxford University Press, 1979; second edition, University of New Mexico Press, 1998). The pertinent sections are excerpted elsewhere in this volume.

⁷ Light Readings. The portrait in question can be found on p. 12 of the present volume.

⁸ See "An Arranged Marriage," elsewhere in this volume.

⁹ A new version of this now appears, under entirely different management, as American Photo On Campus; and the issue I’m looking at – Vol. 1, no. 2 (March 1997) – is headlined “Digital Special.”

¹⁰ From the text of an unpublished lecture titled "Expecting the Barbarians: Photography Education Awaits the Millenium," delivered at Syracuse University on May 2, 1988.

¹¹ Aside from a few relevant passages in interviews with me, the only substantial and pertinent texts of mine on this subject not included in this collection are "The Vanishing Borderline: Sketch for A Manifesto on the 'Democratization' of Art," from 1986, which appears in another published collection of my essays, Depth of Field: Essays on Photography, Mass Media and Lens Culture (University of New Mexico Press, 1998), and a summer 1997 lecture, "Analogizing the Digital: Issues for A Medium in Transition." That lecture, and those interviews, will be included in a forthcoming book of mine, Speaking of Photography. The interested reader may also want to factor in another essay from Depth of Field, "Mutant Media: Photo/Montage/Collage," which considers at length the analog precursors to much digital activity in photography.

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From The Digital Evolution: Visual Communication in the Electronic Age, Essays, Lectures and Interviews 1967-1998 (Tucson: Nazraeli Press, 1998).

Copyright © 1998 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved. For reprint permissions contact Image/World Syndication Services, POB 040078, Staten Island, NY 10304-0002 USA;T/F (718) 447-3091, imageworld@nearbycafe.com