by Dr.Neil Chapman,  Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, Falmouth University.   New practices and discourses emerging since the 1990s have focused on the implications of some significant technological shifts in image culture. An increasing predominance of photographs made by machines and intended primarily as tools in technical processes has led to the designation ‘operational image’. The implications include changes in how subjects (individuals, or citizens) are viewed, for instance by governments, corporations, and the military. Similarly, the ever-improving resolution of digital images and the acceleration of their distribution gives rise to complex and far-reaching effects. Debates such as those inaugurated by Harun Farocki, and Hito Steyerl more recently, have concentrated on paradoxes where these new technologies and their cultural effects are concerned. On the one hand, the technologies promote the interests of those funding the developments, and on the other hand the changes come with potentials, new ways of democratising image-making practices, new circuits of exchange, and new ways of critiquing power. Such themes are invoked by the two series of Nick Berkeley’s photographs in this current exhibition. Time After Time, re-exhibited here [...]