Course 16: Digital Photography

Vera Chiquet · University of Basel

Lecturer

Vera Chiquet is a digital humanities researcher with a background in art history and sociology (PhD), who previously served as deputy head of the Digital Humanities professorship at the University of Basel and helped initiate the DH-CH network. Her research focuses on computational and experimental methods in visual studies, the history of photographic manipulation, and participatory approaches to analogue and digital image archives, as explored in the SNSF-funded PIA project. She is the author of Fake Fotos and continues to work on photography, curation, and the use of artificial intelligence for metadata enhancement in visual collections. She currently directs the Swiss Agricultural Museum and supports digital research initiatives through her startup Virtual Culture.

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Lecture Overview

Overview

Chiquet uses digital photography to explore truth, manipulation, and visual credibility. Starting with an AI-generated avatar and the history of photographic fakery, she shows that concerns often associated with Photoshop and deepfakes have a much longer history inside photography itself.

Main Points

The lecture opens performatively by using an AI-generated clip to raise the question of what counts as believable visual evidence.
Chiquet traces current anxieties about manipulation, retouching, and fabricated images back to the pre-digital history of photography.
Drawing on Mia Fineman’s Faking It, she argues that photography has long been a medium of constructed truth, not a neutral window onto reality.
Digital tools have made manipulation faster, easier, and more widespread, but they did not invent the underlying impulse.
The lecture therefore invites a historically informed and critical reading of digital images, including contemporary deepfakes.

Examples Mentioned

The exhibition and catalog Faking It
Retouched news and fashion photography
Photomontage, multiple exposure, and darkroom manipulation
Walter Benjamin as a frame for reproducibility and media reflection

Source transcript: transcripts/Course 16_Chiquet_DigitalPhoto.txt

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