I first met Robert Burley in the fall of 2008, in the final year of my undergraduate studies at Ryerson University.  Although we never formally discussed his new body of work, it had always fascinated me for reasons that I, at the time, did not fully understand.  While the digital camera was a new and exciting tool, its similarities to the analogue processes that had proceeded it seemed to make the transition of the photograph into digital form inconsequential.  Both analogue and digital cameras created images that would, after all, look quite similar on paper.  Both technologies, for the most part, bore a similar optical design and camera body, and shared many other physical characteristics. 

It was only later and upon much reflection that I realized that the significance of this new technology was greater than I had first thought.  It was not the image produced by the camera that was fundamentally different.  It certainly was not the idea that one could view their images immediately on the back of the camera that was significant.  Even the qualities of the image produced by digital cameras, in many cases, are still inferior to those produced by film-based cameras.  Rather, it was the digitization of the image and its continuing integration within our vast array of technologies, networks and digital devices that truly separates it from its analogue brother.  No longer is the image indexically fixed upon a physical surface.  Is free to travel, at any given moment, halfway across the world and back in the blink of an eye. 

In 2012, Burley will exhibit his work within the Image Arts Gallery at Ryerson University and publish a monograph regarding the death of traditional photography.  With Kodak in the midst of uncertainty and factory closures, Burley comments to the Wall Street Journal regarding the legacy of the analogue: “It’s yellow boxes of film, point and shoot Brownie and Instamatic cameras, and those hand sized prints that made it possible for countless millions to freeze-frame their world. [They] were the products used to remember – and really define – what that entire century looked like.”

It took more than four years, but realizing the importance of this project, along with my own questioning about the effects of digital technology, have lead me to explore some of the world’s most photographed places.  I wanted to at least try and understand the full ramifications of this transition.  In hindsight, I asked myself, what would this century look like?