Stretching Painting and Photography: the morphologies of the digital image file

This paper explores how artists have extended the possibilities for the image’s forms and manifestations by understanding the digitalization of the image as an opportunity to resist or counter conventional fixities. The digital image file might be said to produce a new realism not by appearing to resemble the world indexically, but by revealing the technological ‘program’ of the image in its digital codings and outputs, which alter our understanding of the world in turn. Concluding with the work of Louise Lawler, currently the subject of a major survey at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, reveals the meeting point of the photographic and painterly image in the shifting presentation of works in relation to space, media and our conceptions of the object.