First reading – 5th chapter from Daniel J. Boorstin’s A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America starts off with a description of change in American culture with its most radical expression in the way how people have appropriated image in the place that until then was occupied by ideals which is also the subject of this chapter. I am not sure how much I will be able to understand as since from the beginning of the reading it was made sure it would deal with American culture which for me is a matter of knowledge through indirect source. Boorstin continues with a criticism on the lost of value in American culture; he states that no only the word itself has changed from value to the plural form but theses values are no longer a standard for living, the society create their own values as a criterion to be lived by; the values can be adjusted for the developing needs of the society. People feel powerful, they feel as creators. This assertion applies also to God – Boorstin asserts that “he is viewed as a television show only at our convenience. [..] We have made God into the biggest celebrity of all, to contain our own emptiness. [..] God himself becomes not a power but an image.” The religion has been long dependent on imagery – there is no church without an iconic painting or stained-glass window; iconography, for instance, has significant role in protestantism, the Bible study for children couldn’t exist nowadays without imagery in it and God which is, in general, an abstraction, becomes an image. The image is a tool to sell everything.
From this thought, Boorstin then continues with corporate image and its role. He describes this pseudo-ideal = image as synthetic, believable, passive, vivid, simplified and ambiguous and expands on each of those.
1. Synthetic means that an image has been created for a special purpose. The examples Boorstin gives is a trademark and a brand name. And here he mentions a lot of slogans that are not familiar to my Latvian culture, even though I understand the idea of a slogan that stays on your mind for a very long time, something that (maybe along with a visual representation) creates an image of the company. Boorstin notes that “an image is a visible public “personality” as distinguished from an inward private “character”.” This image is the opposite of a natural representation, every detail is considered, rethought and redeveloped. There are so many companies today that are working on developing the image of an company and often also the image of a person, as president, for instance.
2. Image must be believable. It should correspond to an imagined representation but it is also always undervalued.
3. An image is passive. An interesting thought is delivered here – “an image becomes real only when it has become public.” It might be the reality of a corporative image but I wouldn’t agree so much when it comes to an artistic imagery. This is a question that we briefly touched upon during the last class – does a piece become art only if it is shown in an institutional space?
4. An image is vivid and concrete.
5. An image is simplified; the most effective image would be simple and distinctive.
6. An image is ambiguous. “It floats somewhere between the imagination and the senses, between expectation and reality.”
To be honest, I don’t know a lot about the advertising, corporate image simply because I am not particularly interested in the field. I cannot deny it surrounds me every day everywhere I go and I wouldn’t be sure either that it doesn’t influence me but I don’t feel competent to talk about it.
Then Boorstin goes back to the comparison of ideal and image. If an ideal demands effort to be attained, then an image is subjected to the needs. The change of thinking brought people from thinking of ideals to images. The problem lies in the simplification which on its turn led people to imitate themselves. Boorstin talks about the public image; this phenomenon is even more vivid today. With the further development of the imagery, technologies and self-awareness, people tend to think more of how they are represented that who they are. I do think that making a public image does not necessarily show who the person is, it still plays by the rules – the one mentioned above or new ones but the public image represents something that would be firstly understood by larger audience and secondly that it would play in person’s advantage.
The other excerpt is from Susan Sontag’s On Photography. Since the very beginning, Sontag touches some interesting points of what photography is and how it has changed people and their way of looking at things. There is no doubt that photography has played a crucial role in changing the way of looking, seeing. Dorothea Lange has once said that “the camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” Susan Sontag goes further, she claims that photography has taught us a new visual code and given us the sense that the world could be seen, understood by the images. Today, this invention has gone so far that it even harms. I think that people are no longer looking at things without photographing them and I am not sure that Lange’s thought would apply to a general public. Unfortunately, the ease of photographing (and sharing the photographs) does not always help in noticing what we are surrounded by, not talking even about understanding the world. This enormous desire to capture everything that we see is probably explained by Sontag when she states the following: “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and, therefore, like power.” People have always seemed power, today it might be also by means of photography. Sontag sees a problem in the advanced importance of the photographed because it, opposed to the painting, does not show the full statement of the world but only pieces of it; furthermore, this evidence change the scale of the world and devalues it by its fragility. The less damaging mode to keep photographs would be in a book form, which is also the most common but that creates an issue of looking at the photographs, respectively, it raises the question if the order is imposed.
Sontag talks about another interesting aspect – photography being a proof. Today it is no longer evident as we have so many tools of correction, faking, manipulation. But another aspect of photography has on the other hand grown in its importance – the surveillance. It started to be as a helpful tool to resolve crimes and it is undoubtedly still today but the modern possibilities have lead the surveillance possibilities so far that people can feel under surveillance all the time – another extreme. And then, photography is more of interpretation that reality. Sontag illustrates it with the fact that a photographer chooses one image among many frames, a certain light, a certain angle and a certain expression. Besides, photography nowadays is a widely used tool (and even more now in comparison to the 1960s when Susan Sontag wrote the text), therefore, in the most cases, it is not practiced as art. “As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.” This quote is an interesting statement; to my understanding, it deals much more with psychology than an average photographer would think about (or know). I am not sure if it is the same notion that Sontag had in her mind but I rather need to know a place to feel able to photograph it. On the other hand, it is true that a camera is somehow disarming tool for many people, they are curious, thus it facilitates the contact.
Susan Sontag states that “photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention.” It is surely evident in her examples but sometimes a photographer is just a photographer but his or her photograph, being an evidence or allocating more importance to an event than it might need (as she stresses earlier in the text), might make someone else react to this fact seen in a photograph. I am not saying that a photograph can change the world but I believe that it can create a chain where at some point the changes are possible. Sontag also touches on the subject of voyeurism in photography. Giving examples of naughtiness and a camera as killing weapon she shows only a marginal side of photography or photographers; also, as she points out, a camera being all the time in between subject and photographer, does not make photography the most immoral activity. It would be possible to find fantasy aspects in any profession, weather it deals with photography or not. And again, maybe it is no longer the field of photography but psychotherapy instead. The only term that has always been very confusing for me in English is “shooting”. Hearing someone “I shot him in the park” out of context may lead to absolutely different interpretation.
Sontag continues though the idea of photography as a weapon and delivers that photography renders an image of people as they had never seen themselves before. For me, it is simply a different self-awareness. In general, people never see themselves the same way as other people do. We could, of course, say that a photographed is a symbolic rendering of a person but would it be a “sublimated murder”? However, the idea of photography being a nostalgic art is more understandable to me, indeed, in a way, it has a nostalgic character, as it encompasses past. Also, photographs can shock (when showing the war, for instance) but is the shock bigger as if the event would have been seen in real life? Does this reproduced event really influences more? One thing is sure – the larger audience only (and fortunately) only sees the photographs but can the impact of the photographic document which, for sure, stays as a proof be more vivid after a while as, possibly, the memories fade away? Sontag later mentions that “most photographs do not keep their emotional charge.” Another thing is sure – photography give information; but it cannot be read directly, a photograph cannot tell anything, therefore it always remains an interpretation.
Thoughts on Photography 