Digital Art Defined

In the words of Charles Baudelaire, the Leica M11 dares you not to shoot what it looks like, but rather to shoot what it feels like

- Jonathan Ho

WHILE THE 19TH CENTURY IS REMEMBERED as an era of rapidly accelerating scientific discovery and invention – with significant developments in the fields of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, electricity, and metallurgy that laid the groundwork for the technological advances of the 20th century – it behooves us to recall that it was also during this time that important new styles in art, including Romanticism, Realism and Impressionism, emerged.

In addition to these new styles, there came a new medium entirely: photography. The introduction of photography was controversial in the art realm because some thought it lacked the artistic depth of other mediums and had crucial inability to capture colour and render moving objects.

Although it was regarded by many as “threatening” to existing mediums and artists, French poet Charles Baudelaire offered this explanation in its defence: “Romanticism neither depends precisely on choice of subject nor in exact truth, but a mode of feeling”. Indeed, while photography had the potential for “exact truth”, the new medium’s ability to capture images from different perspectives, coupled with the different techniques for film processing, more than made up for any perceived limitations in colour and movement. As an innovation, it created an avenue for individuals to become artists without spending years of apprenticeship under a master artist. What it “lacked”, it more than made up for by contributing a space for creative vision for those who dared to create new art with the new contraptions.