Westminster Photography BA Brick Lane

Why is it that photography shows now seem often to include Video projections? Is it the possibility of including sound linked to the presentation? There seems to be a prevailing necessity to have all visual work subsumed by the technology of the digital presentation.
The technical constraints of ‘chemical photography’ are quite different from the manipulative skills of a computer program. There is a sense of encountering the haptic quality of the paper and the magic of chemical transformations that is lost when reducing the image to a digital manipulation on a monitor.
I know that, by definition, photography is ‘painting with light’ but the real magic comes to transferring the visual image to the reality of paper and pigment by chemical means.
Paul Virilio, however, claims that photography lies, in that it captures ‘the moment’ whereas reality is in constant flux and time passing. Perhaps it is this feeling of the necessity of conveying the notion of ‘time passing’ that drives the artist towards the video representation?
Lev Manevich has something to say about the difference between the ‘analogue’ and the ‘digital’.
Digital reduces the image to a mathematical formula which is finite, but analogue retains a sense of the infinite. An object can be defined and manipulated algorithmically, whereas analogue images are truly ‘continuous’.
I found the space of the gallery wonderful, but sadly the images did not really fill this space…betraying its’ promise! There were the usual attempts to discover ‘identity’ or to portray the current dynamics of their world [the pop scene, nightclubbing etc].
The most beautiful series of images was by Siobhan Doran who had produced a book of images based on the now defunct Midland Grand Hotel St. Pancras. These exhibited not only a skill full eye in selecting the image, but a commensurate ability to print up these images! The book was enhanced by a brief narrative which held the images together well and gave a sense of carefully constructed framework to the presentation.
Another series of very evocative images was presented by Jessica Begault. The series was of people looking out of windows at the ‘world outside’, taken from inside the room. The people were in shadow and the rectangle of the window was the one bright area of the image. In composition, they were carefully arranged and managed to elicit a feeling of considered contemplation. They were, somehow poignant and thoughtful, in contrast with the more strident and glaring photos of pop scenes and modern culture that were around them.