"Coleman's discussion of the impact of technology on traditional photography serves as a brilliant . . . record of how new electronic tools have permeated our lives. . . . [Coleman's] ideas and concepts . . . are immensely valuable and insightful, with hints of what our future may hold. Coleman's critical eye makes [The Digital Evolution] required reading for today's media-savvy or information-obsessed artist."

-- Daniel Carter, Design Editor, Wired, July 1999
(click here for this complete review online)

-- Kitty Hubbard, Afterimage

-- Gary Crighton, British Journal of Photography

"Nazraeli also publishes critical prose, . . . clearly anchored by the accomplished writings of A. D. Coleman and Bill Jay. . . . [Coleman's] latest book, The Digital Evolution, examines with a forthright lucidity how computerization and electronics have affected the photographic arts. Coleman's writing . . . is informative and unpretentious -- a rare combination in art criticism of any kind."

-- Eric Lorberer, Rain Taxi: Review of Books

. . . Do you remember The Singing Nun?

A phenomenon of the ecumenical 1960s, she called herself Sœur Sourire -- Sister Smile -- and, accompanying herself on acoustic guitar, ran a lilting little ersatz-folk ditty about St. Dominic into a Top-Ten single and an international hit album. It was a charming song; anyone over the age of twenty-five probably recalls the tune, and perhaps even the mellifluous French lyrics: "Dominique-nique-nique combattit les Albigeois . . ." (Little Dominic fought the Albigensians.)

Do you remember the Albigensians?

They were a medieval Christian sect in the south of France, believers in the Manichaean doctrine. Manichaeism held, among its tenets, that the existence of evil was necessary in order for human beings to recognize good -- and that God therefore must have created evil as well as good. The hierarchy of the Catholic Church determined this complex and Eastern-influenced philosophical position to be heretical. It was decided that the Albigensian heresy had to be eliminated; Dominic was one of numerous individuals charged with that task.

The Albigensian heresy was eliminated by eliminating the Albigensians -- man, woman, and child -- in a prolonged bloodbath of a crusade so virulent that, according to The Encyclopaedia Brittanica, "[t]his implacable war . . . threw the whole of the nobility of the north of France against that of the south, and destroyed the brilliant Provençal civilization." For his role in this solution to that problem, among other accomplishments, Dominic was canonized.

So that song which we all remember with such pleasure celebrates the destruction by genocide of a dualistic conception of the universe. It is a charming song, though, isn't it? Or is it?

I'd suggest that it is not only naive but potentially dangerous to respond to a song on a "purely musical" basis, without attempting to decipher the many messages that may be encoded therein. . . .

Our visual hardware has already reached a point at which photographically credible still and kinetic imagery -- some of it even three-dimensional -- can be generated with little or no basis in reality. I've touched on this subject before; I come back to it because the technology keeps growing more sophisticated, and we're not changing ourselves enough to keep up with it. We are hardly prepared to deal with this technology, even in its most benign manifestations. Its malignant capacities are awesome and self-evident.

The only solution is cultural self-defense. We must take the tools into our own hands. Pay closer attention to what we see and what we are being shown than we ever have before. Consider, discuss, and argue with what its being communicated to us visually. Pick up the image-making machines and learn to control them. Teach our children well. And remember: the seduction of Narcissus was visual.

-- From "Remember: The Seduction of Narcissus Was Visual"
(originally published in the Village Voice, November 1976).

. . . In Mike Nichols's film The Graduate, the older generation's sage counsel for the future was summed up in a word: "Plastics." If an equivalent torch were being passed to the younger generation today, I'd expect a different distillation: "Information."

We are presently undergoing an epochal transformation of our technology for the gathering, storage, retrieval and transmission of information. Such advanced communications media as video, Super-8 film, and instant color photography already are publicly available and economically accessible to a wide range of people. Public access to radio and TV broadcasting facilities and channels is a tenuously established legal right and, in some experimentally minded communities, an established fact. Various other devices for the publication and dissemination of information -- including the offset press and the postal system -- are at everyone's disposal. (None of it is free -- tools never are -- but much of it is inexpensive.)

Looming on the horizon, simultaneously, is the so-called "personal computer" in combination with the "home entertainment center." These devices, in some not-too-distant versions, are bound to include scanners capable of reading (and printing out) virtually all the common forms of encoded data: microform, videodisc, computer cards, and a host of others. They will put the entire Library of Congress at the disposal of any member of the citizenry who can afford these imminent successors to the standard television set. In fact, it will become possible for the entire contents of the Library of Congress to be stored in a few square yards of shelf space.

Because we are prone to thinking of information as written material, the common assumption is that this transformation will affect only our dealings with the written word. This is far from the case. . . .

-- From "Fiche and Chips: Technological Premonitions"
(originally published in Camera Austria, October 1981).

-- From "Fotofutures: Ten Possibilities in No Particular Order"
(originally published in Camera & Darkroom, July 1993).