Photography as a unique visual medium, with the ability of "objective" reappearance of reality, it is regarded as the nature of photography in the more than 170 years of photographic development. It is used to record and reproduce life, and it is also used in scientific discovery, exploration and news reporting, but in fact, this nature is constantly being questioned, absolute objectivity and truth are non-existent, and there is no truth in the picture. In the 1980s, western theorists claim that digital technology will lead to the end of photography and death, this idea stems from two of anxieties. First of all, because of computer-driven digital imaging and widespread dissemination, it makes "fake" photos can impersonate "real" photos, viewers of the ability to convey the objective truth of photography lost confidence. Photography will gradually lose its power as an exclusive message-passing person; Secondly, there is a fear that we will enter an era where reality and virtual property can no longer be separated, that all reliable concepts are collapsing, that the whole world will be made up of man-made nature, and that it is meaningless to distinguish between truth and falsehood. Therefore, photography faces two obvious crises: the first is technical (digital technology for the physical, chemical, optical transcendence of traditional photography); the second is the cognitive level (the virtual nature of the long-term photographic culture taught to people, the concept of space-time, the existence of State and the adaptation of cognitive experience). Under the influence of these two crises, photography will disappear in the near future. But what is the outcome of it?

JIN Quan. The Nature Exploration of Photography from Silver Salt to Pixels. International Journal of New Developments in Engineering and Society (2018) Vol. 2: 27-31.

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