Augmented Reality and Contemporary Photography

This research project undertakes a new definition of the photographic image in the age of the digital fusion of indexical and non-indexical image elements, drawing upon established positions in contemporary fine art photography and upon my earlier studies of photographic indexicality. It contributes to the theory of contemporary photography by focusing on the relationship between reality, images, and the reality of images in the light of the latest developments in Augmented Reality technologies. The recent works of Jeff Wall and Andreas Gursky are exemplary for my study. Both artists produce images against the background of documentary and pictorial photography, refer to realist painting, and also combine digital montage and collage techniques with analogue forms of image recording and presentation. Their hybrid images, which, despite their multiple references, suggest a singular spatiotemporal relation to reality and appear as indexical photographs, I define as augmented documents. This project departs from earlier studies on the use of digital enhancement technologies in three important ways. First, it focuses on artistic works of contemporary photography which call into question their specific relationship to reality and their material presence as image objects, and thus invoke the realism problem of painting. Second, in studying the "old" new medium of photographic reproduction in the light of the latest developments of augmented reality it employs a transmedial and transhistorical perspective on the problem of reality reference in photography. Third, in defining photographic images as the result of light projection or its digital simulation it enables the integration of material and immaterial, of indexical and non-indexical images. By presenting a conceptual differentiation between various modes of photographic referentiality, the project provides a redefinition of the photographic, so often called for in the critical literature, which moves beyond the opposition of analogue/digital and the supposed lack of reference of digital(ized) images. In this way, the project contributes to an integrative theory of modern images which links media and image studies together with the problem`s specifically photo-theoretical aspects.