Observed in the photo-frenzy that now occurs in from of any landmark. An example of how the contemporary phenomenon of the age of digital photography highlights the way a post-digital sense of agency has deactivated the subject as simply a passive object of the photographic gaze, and activated a new sense of the agency of the subject. In the past, the technology left all the procedures through which the artist asserted his/her agency in their own hands, in their own time, subject to decisions over which the subject has no knowledge or influence. Digital photography has profoundly changed peoples’ experience of the photographic process. Consider how people now pose for their photographic image and then immediately check the outcome, and how the capacities of the technology for instant feedback and the ubiquitous nature of photography as social process causes us to think of ourselves as a potential image. It’s as if the subject now “takes” their own image – causing the photographer to perform their role under the subject’s direction. And it is now more likely that the image finds its audience on Facebook or Flickr and not as a printed image. Experience changes understanding, and expectations.

That a tradition such as that occupied by a Bill Henson may be located in the old school of wet photography and a gallery context matters little to a contemporary audience, especially so when the images may be distributed and experienced on screen more often than on the wall. After all, despite the way they are “framed” by the gallery setting, his photographs are more directly coherent with digital modes of representation than any painting of a similar subject. Which is why they are out there…

Now click through the following sequence to see how the image above happened…

(see our previous discussion of agency in relation to the Bill Henson issue)