Realism

Ribalta and WJT Mitchell are both arguing against the death of realism due to digital photography, photoshop, digital alterations etc.  They both discuss that even though the process of altering a photograph has become easier in the digital age due to photoshop alterations within photographs have always occurred.  Ribalta states that the photographic activity of postmodernism had already denaturalized photography in the decades before and that now there needs to be a new critique for this new type of realism that has emerged "a new kind of molecular realism."WJT brings into his essay William J. Mitchells thoughts on the difference between analog and digital and that is analog being continuous and digital being discrete or separate.  He makes this comparison through the metaphor of rolling down a ramp and walking down stairs and a analog clock with a hand and a digital clock with merely just numbers displayed.

WJT easily destroys this comparison by pointing out that one you can in fact figure out how many rotations it takes for a ball to go down a ramp and two that for this metaphor to be consistent one would walk down the ramp.  By this WJT claims that though there is a difference between analog and digital it is not as rigid or binary as William J. makes it out to be but it is much more flexible the stairs can be given analog representation and the ramp can be digitalized.  WJT further discuss digital and analog through the work of Chuck Close.  He brings in Nelson Goodmans relation of digital and analog through numbers but explains that they do not need to be just numbers but any discrete set of things i.e color.  This is where he brings in Chuck Close as a example the paintings are arranged like a digital grid with pixels but each "pixel" is treated like a painting.