It was really interesting to see the progression in how we have become the visual image hungry society that we are today. Starting as early as Vaudeville, when groups of spectators gathered to be visually stimulated, to the visual effects-packed mega blockbusters we pay $10 to see today, the advances in technology and the ways they have affected us a culture are immense. One point that the book makes is that the reason cinema is the mass entertainment medium that it is today is not merely just that it has the ability to show us moving images, but because it gave us the ability to assemble in a group before the projected image. Before this people viewed quickly moving images through peephole devices in a private, voyeuristic manner, which completely changes the meaning of what is being seen.
I never before thought of the evolving meaning and value of the term “authentic.” The ability to reproduce images has completely changed the meaning of the word, but for several different reasons. It is interesting that the book notes that, “a reaffirmation of the unique image, one that had more value than the copy, took place precisely at the time when that original image could be easily reproduced in copies thanks to the photographic camera.” This is another example of how innovative technology alone doesn’t affect our culture. The reproducibility stood as a roadblock in allowing photography to be accepted at the same level of art that paintings and drawings held.
While that may be the drawback to photography, the most positive attribute was its inherent truth-telling abilities. Less existent today, when photography was first being used, it was used to document facts in the realm of medicine, science, and law. The “noeme” of photography is the fact that a picture is guaranteed to have been physically copresent with the subject, sharing the same space, light and air.
While I was in Washington last semester, I was able to visit Reuters and talk to the head of the photography department. He showed us pictures that he had been taking during the election campaigns, and then one very familiar one popped up. It is a picture that looks as if Senator McCain is running to grab Senator Obama’s butt…
It was reproduced everywhere and we all had seen the picture at least a hundred times, and there we were sitting with the man who snapped his camera to take it. He told us the narrative behind the photo (that McCain had started walking the wrong way off the stage after a debate and made an awkward gesture as he went to turn around), but almost no one else would receive that narrative. They would produce their own meanings-- and they did. He said he received dozens of letters from people who had digitally doctored his photo to make jokes. Even these reproductions received a lot of publicity.
When the chapter talks about Che Guevara and asks if the constant reproduction of the image diminishes the intentional meaning, I thought of many other works that this has been done to as well. I feel like you can find “Starry Night” on everything from notebooks to coffee mugs, and we have two Picasso pieces in our dorm room. I think they definitely do take on a whole new meaning in a college dorm room than the original does in a famous art museum. We also have 4 Andy Warhol posters, each with his image washed over in a solid color, and a quote in black type over it. They all look extremely similar aside from the color and the actual quote, which makes sense because Warhol was always trying to make the point that art had become a cultural and capitalist commodity. I think he is the master of image reproduction.
One other personal reaction I thought of while reading the section of ownership and copyrights. Before I interned at a magazine last semester, I had no idea how much images cost. We were given major discounts since we were a non-profit, but it was still more than I would have ever imagined a photo costing. Our September/ October issue of Moment featured Jon Stewart on the cover, and trying to find a picture of him that we liked that the owner would allow us to use and that wasn’t outrageously out of our price rage seemed like an impossible task.
Main Points:
-“Technologies interact with people and then forces of politics, economics, and other aspects of culture in various social and historical contexts”
-Imaging and its reproducibility directly relates to the governmental system in place. The means of production in socialist, fascist, and democratic states are drastically different.
-The meaning/ value of the term “authentic” is forever changing and evolving
-Photography was once held as the standard of truth, but this sense of objectivity is being eroded as it becomes easier and easier for us to manipulate digital images.
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