Summary “An introduction to visual culture”

Chapter 5 Visual Technologies, Image Reproduction, and the Copy

The visual technologies of reproduction have evolved progressively since the early nineteenth century. The development of visual technologies from mechanical to digital made tremendous impacts on reproducibility on social meanings and value of images. This chapter is mainly about the reproduction of images through technological means and the social and cultural changes that accompany changes in technologies of reproduction.

Visual Technologies

There is one way of understanding the history of imaging technologies by examining how the introduction of a particular invention. We contradict the statement because technologies cannot determine social change which means they can be used in different ways. They do have important and influential effects on society but they are also the product of their particular societies and eras and the ideologies that exist within them and their use.

The possibility of visual technologies often precedes their development. As for photography, the possibility means the chemical and mechanical elements existed prior it was invented in the late 1830s. After its introduction, photography rapidly became a demonstrably widespread social imperative.

Photography emerged as a popular medium because it fit certain emerging social concepts and needs of the time. This new visual technology epitomized the new and modern way of seeing that prevailed in the nineteenth century.

Motion and Sequence

Just like photography, the emergence of visual technologies of motion in the late 1800s corresponded with an increased desire to visualize movement in the increasingly mobile and fast-spaced society at that time.

The introduction of cinema projection devices was preceded by an interest in paintings and photographs representing movement that could not be grasped by the unaided eye. Eadweard Muybridge produced a study of animal and human locomotion in the late nineteenth century which was one of many scientific and popular uses of the photographic motion study during this period. He used his cameras to grasp sequences of images showing the detail process of movements.

Beside Muybrige’s study, other forms of visual display also set the stage for the development of cinema, such as the magic lantern show, Praxinoscopes and stereoscopes.

In 1891, Thomas Edison publicly displayed a device called a kinescope which is the initial experiment of cinematic viewing in United States. Individual viewers could watch a projection of a short motion picture film through a peephole of the device. This device was prevailed because it provided the spectator a voyeuristic domain to enjoy a short amusing vignette.

The invention of celluloid enabled projector to exhibit films onto a surface in a projection that was large enough for an assembled group of people to watch the film simultaneously. With the development of projector, cinema became a form of mass entertainment.

Eventually cinema added sound to photography which allowed the photographic image to become a primary means of temporal narrative storytelling. In the 1930s to 1940s, the maturity period of editing techniques, the relatively short shots could be linked together leading the spectator not to notice the cuts and take the cinematic meaning into signifying chains, which made the films make sense.

Cinema borrowed codes from photography and added motion and sequential action and established complex new modes of representation. Then it shift again with the electronic media such as television in the mid-twentieth century and the emergence of digital technology in the late twentieth century. Each new form of visual technology builds on the codes of previous technologies but that each constitutes as well a kind of epistemic shift.

Image Reproduction: The Copy

The copy is not a new phenomenon. But in the ancient times, without modern technologies of reproduction, art was sometimes reproduced in the form of hand-made copies which means the reproduction was, paradoxically, a means to making an original work.

The technologies of reproduction like printmaking techniques have been central to the information convection and knowledge dissemination since the early fifteenth century. Despite the availability of reproduction options, the value of the original work still holds in the art market. What’s more, with the rise of reproduction, a reaffirmation of the unique artwork made it more valuable.

1839 is usually given as the date for photography’s invention because of the introduction of Daguerreotypes. In 1884, roll film was introduced which indicated another significant step that enhanced reproducibility.

In the fine art market, the concept of the original continues to reign. Because of the strong association of photographic form with the mechanical instrument and the technical process and not the hand of the artist, the fine art market hardly accepted it as an art form. While the quality of instrumental objectivity enabled photography embodied the rationalism of the modern era and widely used as a means of documenting truths, augmenting the eye. The photography is a realist form not simply because of its verisimilitude but because of its guarantee of having been physically co present. This quality earned photography strong place in law. The photograph is empirical in both an epistemological sense and an ontological sense. In another word, the photograph can provide knowledge of what has been and it also guarantees that something has, in fact, been.

As I mentioned before, although the photograph is now regarded as a form of fine art, its status as art has been long debated and was hardly won. It was not until 1902 that photographs were formally shown in the galleries of fine art. And in 1914, Clive Bell published his essay “Art” which argued that only significant form distinguishes art from not-art in arousing out aesthetic emotions. Obviously the photographic would arouse aesthetic appreciation within the terms photography’s own distinct codes. Art photographers thus gained acceptance for their medium as a form that has its own unique qualities.

Walter Benjamin and Mechanical Reproduction

Benjamin argued that the one-of-a-kind artwork has a particular aura for its unique existence in time and space. Yet the concept of authenticity is used in many different ways today, such as a timeless quality, or seeing an image as if without techniques, or associated with amateur filmmaking. Authenticity is also a quality that clings to the idea of a classic type within a category of people or icons that cannot be reproduced.

The art works were unique and exclusive in the past while the inherently reproducible form became much more pervasive by the end of the twentieth century, transforming art-marking and art-marketing practices dramatically. The techniques for verifying the authenticity of art works have developed simultaneously with the reproduction techniques. Reproduction plays an essential role in the dissemination of art and becomes the form through which meaning and value are maintained and developed in original works. For instance, Mona Lisa is known to most people by its innumerable reproductions which have been produced into numerous forms of ready-mades.  Benjamin’s points remain valid today that the reproduction of a singular image has an effect on the meaning and value of that original image and that the mechanical reproducibility of images changes their relationship to rituals of meaning, use, and value in their respective markets.

The Politics of Reproducibility

Reproduction allows images to circulate with political meaning. The function of art begins to be based on the politics. The most famous image that has served as an icon for revolutionary figure is a photograph of Che Guevara taken in 1961. The reproduction in many forms of this photograph made Che an icon of revolutionary politics throughout the world. Even the beret worn by Che in the photo became a symbol of revolutionary politics. The reproducibility of this image opens its potential to be deployed for political purposes. It also means the original meaning of the image can be transformed for a more general meaning by the constant reiteration.

The reproduction of images also raises issues about copyright and ownership. Tradition of political arts is supposed to be copyrighted and owned by an individual, while the image of AIDS activities is intended to be copied and passed around and not owned by anyone. The value of the image does not come from its reference to any original but it derived specifically from its proliferation. And the signification of an image can be dramatically changed by accompanied with different kinds of text.

Copies, Ownership, and Copyright

Copyright grants legal protection to the “expression of an idea”, not the idea itself. The transfer of the ownership does not mean the transfer of the right to reproduction. In other words, authenticity resides in the painting as a unique expression of the painter’s idea and not literal uniqueness of the object “the painting”.

We cannot dismiss the material value of the actual work besides the expression of idea. Techniques for authenticating works of art are based on the material of actual works which can be analyzed.

The diverse cases of copyright, right of publicity, trademark practice, and Fair-Use Doctrine testing suggest that reproduction has become an important issue and the proliferation of copies and technologies for making them has made the stakes in owning the original. Digital technologies have made the original hard to identify and the intangibles harder to document and trace, it is not easy to infirm the concept “original” in the era of technological reproducibility and simulation.

Reproduction and the Digital Image

The most widely discussed difference between conventional and digital photography concerns what happens after the take, before the print is struck. With technologies available in digital image manipulation software programs, images can be edited as whatever one wishes. Thus digital photography has altered the “that has been” effect of conventional photography. Anyway, the capacity for manipulation and multiple contextualizations is not new. It has always been possible to fake realism in photographs by virtual depictions. The wide availability and accessibility of digital techniques make not just image production but also image reproduction and alteration an everyday aspect of consumer experience.

Well, I think we should not just emphasis too much on the negative effects of digital reproduction such as faking and cheating. The reproduction in digital era remains meaningful and available to tell the truth. Digital images emerge new form of representation and assert a new kind of value. They can be enhanced and transformed and combined like DNA to produce new intellectual structures with their own dynamics and value.