The visual culture and the esthetic of digital photograph in the context of social mind

This thesis explores the concept of photography and esthetics in recent years with the rising in the digital technology through the visual culture and social mind. The photography, which is a significant instrument of visual communication to constitute a social mind, has been questioned in terms of reliability, esthetic, ethics after the digitalization of the image. However photography realizes the realistic witness of the reminiscence for the social mind. The photography registers the elapsed time, the lost lives, the traditions, briefly, all about the mankind and the nature. The photograph functions as an eidetic (picturesque) mind for the viewer.The photograph, which is the eyewitness and the visual inventory of the history, the lastingness, and the actuality, represents the photographer, not the reality itself when it is broken off from its own nature.Since the invention of the photograph in 1839, the relation between photograph and the society has been evolved in a parallel process; and it has become a media that has been questioned in terms of its reliability, after its all progress till now.This circumstance, as a course of its nature, is a paradigm change for the theory of photography. Because the created image is not only the work of its creator but also the indigenous outcome of the methods and the process to make it.The digital photograph has evolved from the conventional photography and the contribution of the information technology. Although much of the esthetic and technical aspects of the digital photograph stem from the conventional photography, it has also brought the new insights and technique to the photography in addition to the creative incentive and new perspective to the viewer?s perception of the image.In recent years the status of photography in art has been experiencing a permanent transformation due to the progress and change in technology. The century we live in, which has been called as the century of the communication, has increased the area of usage of the photograph in art, and besides it has changed the esthetic values of the photograph.The photograph, which testifies the social facts and is an important cultural phenomenon, nowadays has been gaining new dimensions thanks to the facilities of the digital output. Besides, the photograph faces a painful and chaotic contemporary process with regard to the concepts of the esthetic and the ethics without a solid paralellism in the progress.