Openings: Nancy Davenport.

I find digital photography vaguely depressing, an oxymoron like the advertising slogan "a major motion-picture event" or the hip-hop mantra "Keepin' It Real." For one thing, it now seems clear that our greatest account of the photographic medium, Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida (1980), emerged only at the moment of the historical dissolution of precisely those aspects of the photograph that it isolated.

Conceptual art had already embraced an aesthetic of pure photographic denotation, declaring war on what Barthes called the punctum--the photograph's mad dalliance ...

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