What are we expected to feel? Witness, textuality and the audiovisual

Digital technologies have laid bare the double nature of the photographic and recorded sound. Every time the ‘record’ button is pressed, a document is created. There is human intervention (someone presses a button), and a controllable technology creates an artefact, a document. Real events take place in front of the lens and the microphone; digital recorders create files that can be copied, dispatched around the world and extensively manipulated, subject only to the vagaries of software design and availability of internet access. From the outset, this is a doubly double process: it involves human activity and a technology in the creation of an artefact from real events. Digital technology has altered the photographer's relationship with the recording device and the events being recorded. Gone is the eye jammed to the viewfinder, and with it the need for the special skill of the documentary cameraperson to keep ‘the other eye open’ to spot events developing beyond the edge of the frame. There is no need: the handheld camera can be held away from the body, already at a distance, already showing the finished electronic image. With digital stills, the arms-length camera has become the standard way of taking photos, at least amongst non-professional users, and it is ubiquitous with camcorder users. The live image is always already framed and screened on the digital viewfinder. The image-object, the document, is visible at the moment of its creation.