OU blog

Personal Blogs

New photo

MoMA Course Ex 6.11 Photographs and Manipulation

Visible to anyone in the world

How does our constant exposure to images affect our understanding of their content and meaning?

I would expect this to have the effect of creating a stereotypic perceptual record of the image based on key features that may be less to do with what is ‘in’ the image itself than in the common cultural meanings of the image to which it has been reduced. This will ‘deaden’ us to the image, although it may help us to see areas in which manipulations beyond the everyday are made. It certainly deadens us to the fact that photographic images are already manipulations (of the viewfinder, focusing technologies and later cropping or reproductive ‘tricks – accidental or intended during processing, where that is possible). Do we really see a ‘strawberry’ or only the mentally-stored ‘type’ of one? Are we inured to violence in wars by relating it to stored war-image typology (hence the value of Martha Roslin’s manipulations).

Photographs are not reality but constantly seeing or identifying an ‘object’ through its photograph will cause us to make that mistake. Some artists manipulate in order to ensure that we see the photograph itself as an object about something, rather than ‘of something’.

In what ways have digital cameras and software programs such as Photoshop changed photography?

They enable more manipulation top occur after the photograph is initially made and normalise our expectation that photographs are deceptive manipulations – a kind of modern theatrical trompe l’oeil. This makes us wary of news imagery and advertising imagery where aesthetic and functional (sales or propaganda) purposes play fast and loose with each other.

How has the circulation of images online affected the way we think about who we credit for making images?

No image is seen as original or ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ but rather as purposive. Moreover that image is the base for further manipulations – of scale, placement, colouration, and context etc.. Hence, Horvitz prefers to say images ‘propagate’ rather than circulate because from one image derives many only loosely related to the original by the end its non-intentional progress to ongoing multiplicity ends (if it ever does). The idea of unified authorship or of a work having a unified vice (univocality in Bakhtin) is destroyed and not even expected by contemporary audiences for images.


Permalink Add your comment
Share post