• Journal of Science of Art and Design
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• v.11
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• pp.221-249
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• 2007

Today, photography is facing to the crisis of identity and dilemma of ontology from the digital imaging process in the new technology form. It is very important points to say rethinking of the traditional photographic medium, that has changed the way we view the world and ourselves is perhaps an understatement and that photography has transformed our essential understanding of reality. Now, no longer are photographic images regarded as the true automatic recording, innocent evidence and the mirror to the reality. Rather, photography constructs the world for our entertainment, helping to create the comforting illusions by which we live. The recognition that photographs are not constructions and reflections of reality, is the basis for the actual presence within the contemporary photographic world. It is shock. This thesis's aim is to look for the problems of photographic identity and ontological crisis that is controlling and regulating digital photographic imagery, allowing the reproduction of the electronic simulations era. Photography loses its special aesthetic status and becomes no more true information and, exclusively evidence by traditional film and paper that appeared both as a technological accuracy and as a medium-specific aesthetic. The result, photography is facing two crises, one is the photographic ontology(the introduction of computerized digital images) and the other is photographic epistemology(having to do broader changes in ethics, knowledge and culture). Taken together, these crises apparently threaten us with the death of photography, with the 'end' of photography and the culture it sustains. The thesis's meaning is to look into the dilemma of photography's ontology and epistemology, especially, automatical index and digital codes from its origin, meaning, and identity as the technological medium. Thus, in particular, thesis focuses on the analog imagery presence, from the nature in the material world, and the digital imagery presence from the cultural situations in our society. And also thesis's aim is to examine the main issues of the history of photography has been concentrated on the ontological arguments since the discovery of photography in 1839. Photography has never been only one static technology form. Rather, its nearly two centuries of technological development have been marked by numerous, competing of technological innovation and self revolution from the dual aspects. This thesis examines recent account of photography by the analysis of the medium's concept, meaning, identity between film base image and digital base image from the aspects of photographic ontology and epistemology. Thus, the structure of thesis is fairy straightforward to examine what appear to be two opposing view of photographic conditions and ontological situations. Thesis' view contrasts that figure out the value of photography according to its fundamental characteristic as a medium. Also, it seeks a possible solution to the dilemma of photographic ontology through the medium's origin from the early years of the nineteenth century to the raising questions about the different meaning(analog/digital) of photography, now. Finally, this thesis emphasizes and concludes that the photographic ontological crisis reflects to the paradoxical dynamic structure, that unsolved the origins of the medium, itself. Moreover, even photography is not single identity of the photographic ontology, and also can not be understood as having a static identity or singular status from the dynamic field of technologies, practices, and images.