Chapter 5

Visual Technologies, Image Reproduction, and the copy

The term reproduction is a way to describe a copy of an original work. Im Marxist theory uses the term reproduction to describe the way culture practices and their forms of expression reproduce the ideologies and interests of the ruling class.

Visual Technologies 
Technology itself does not determine social change.

Technology interacts with a society and its facets, when doing so it creates changes not only in the technology but in the culture and society it is in.

Speaking about photography as a technology that was once rarely used to something that is integrated in to our everyday life.

Motion and Sequence 

The introduction of film on the late 1800's corresponded with an increased desire to visualize motion in an increasingly evolving and fast paced society in the late 19th century.

Projection machines were invented in the likeness of the camera obscura, a drum shaped object that had a light source and a strip of images that gave the illusion to a movement occurring.

Cinematic meaning is derived not from the individual film frame or take but through the linking together of images an takes into signifying chains. The combination of the two images to create a third meaning.

Image Reproduction; The Copy
The term negative was used to mean an original from which the image was struck.  A daguerreotype was the sole original if the negative was tilted slightly it can be made to reflect light to make the image appear positive

The term noeme comes from phenomenology, a branch of philosophy devoted to the study of embodied sensory experience, which is regarded as the root of being and knowledge.

In Barthes book, Camera Lucida, shows us that the photograph unlike a painting or drawing, has the ability to be copresent. It shares a place and time to which it is representing.

Even though photography was invented in 1839 it wasn't until 1902 that photographs were shown in galleries. And by the end of WWI there was a commercial use for photography.

Walter Benjamin and Mechanical Reproduction

Benjamin saw reproducibility as a potentially revolutionary element because it freed art from it status as a uniquely ritual artifact in traditions of the iconic reverence and exchange.

Benjamin argued that "Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place it happens to be."

Authenticity can refer to seeing or structuring an image as if without the help of the technologies available to us today. It is also applied to the a quality that clings to the idea of classic type within a catagory of people or icons.

Benjamin also noted that the meaning of the original work changes when it is reproduced.

Benjamin's main arguments on reproduction still remain valit today. The meaning of the image is changed when the image is reproduced and the mechanical reproducibility of images changes their relationship to ritualsof meaning, use and value in their respective markets.

Politics of Reproductibility

The photo-collage by Heartfield allows him to make a political statement through reworking images and combining familiar images in new ways. In that sense a drawing may not be able to accomplish the same thing

The reproduction to the portrait of Che shows the relationship to revolution that the people shared with him. Also they speak of him as Che and not his last name, Guevana, this shows an emotional connection that has formed between not only the people viewing these images but also the people creating them.  The relation to reproduction is also the ability to include text, and the ability to immediately associate an image with a word or phrase is something that is extremely powerful.

Copies, Ownership, and Copyright

The term "copyright" means exactly what it says, the right to copy or reproduce an image.  This includes the right to distribute, produce, copy, display,perform, create and control derivative works based on the original.

In trying to understand the terms of copyright in relation to reproductions of a painting, the painting is a unique expression of the painters idea and not in the literal uniqueness of the object itself.



The question of consent is also a big factor when coming into the idea of copyright.  The right to privacy and informed consent.  Because of the film Titicut Follies, which showed life a Massachusetts correctional facility for the criminally insane. The other factors are the consent of the people being filmed and their understanding out how that material obtained will be used.

Reproduction and the Digital Image

Because a digital image has no negative, no original storage medium from which copies are made. Analog images are different from those of a digital image in how they look, generated, stored and distributed.

The digital image is also based on instant pleasure, like the invention of the Polaroid camera invented in the 1960's. The instant image is something that analog cannot do.

The manipulation of digital images is not what revolutionized it, it's the availability of this software to the middle class consumer and their ability to create on a scale that was never possible in the existence of photography.