Ways of Developing a New Democracy of the Image in Photography - Essay Example

In what ways could the development of photography be said to have produced a new "democracy of the image"? by The concept of photography is closely related to the concepts of memory and identity. Every shot is always directed to the past and in some way reflects the personality of photographer. Though this type of visual art appeared more than a century ago, it is still transforming due to fast technological progress and gaining new aspects and forms. Polaroids, film cameras, digital cameras, and smartphones eventually. Photography is becoming more and more popular, and a camera appears to be a trivial tool in every household. Why are people so obsessed with taking pictures? We try to freeze the moment with the help of photography, capture the history that is why photography is something that shows us what happened and will never repeat again. That is why the art of photography as a genre is complicated in terms of time, authenticity, and artistic value. Photographic image is completely different from all the other types of images as it possesses great power and potency. It is capable of telling a story, serving as the evidence of the event or a person and at the same time retrieved from the context it can become a pure visual form. The ambivalent nature of photograph is often emphasized by theorists: on the one hand any photograph is a document while on the other hand it is a visual form, and that determines its qualities. Many theorists studying the phenomenon of photography marked its mass popularity, exceptional representational and artistic possibilities as the central and the most important features. These are the traits that distinguish photographs and make them outstanding as pieces of art even in some trivial contexts. In this paper I will try to examine how could the development of photography be said to have produced a new "democracy of the image" studying closely mass popularity of photography and the phenomenon of domestic photography. I will also pay attention to citizen journalism, a concept that appeared recently due to fast technological progress and illustrate how yesterday consumers of the content turned into prosumers bringing image to a new level. Mass Photography Democracy in some sense means affordability and equality in usage, and the development of mass photograph with its overwhelming accessibility to everyone is creating this democracy of image. Moreover, photography became inevitable element of special occasions for all people. We got used to taking pictures when raising a baby, travelling to foreign countries, and visiting relatives on Christmas. The process of taking pictures has become unconscious, people do it almost mechanically. As mass photography is amateur`s photography it is concentrated around technical aspects rather than artistic features of the final product. Fast and uncontrollable spread of devices allowed users document their lives almost constantly. From this perspective photography is extremely powerful because it gives people a possibility to represent their aspects of life, such as family life, job, hobbies in the light they prefer and choose. Davis underlies that mass photography shows huge potential because it is capable of creating “of alternative representations of one`s sex, class, age group, race, nationality” (Davis & Walton 1985, 289). So mass photography is the way to see people`s lives from inside freely and shape the image of society. For a long time any portrait photography remained a luxury, an exclusive thing, a thing that emphasized social status first of all and was affordable only to higher classes of society. Miniature or big family portraits adorned bedrooms of those who could afford going to salons to take a picture. According to Tagg, it is the rise of lower and middle class that forced manufacturers seek for new ways of new consumers` satisfaction. In such a way the right of being portrayed with the help of photograph was achieved by lower classes in most European countries and America (1988, 53). And only democratization of photograph and its popularity among different classes of people pushed manufacturers to seek new means of production and new materials. So democratization seemed to work in two ways: stimulating photography business which eventually brought freedom and equality of expression to all social classes. Photography as a Document of Family History Basically photography has become the means of documenting family history, and this is its primary purpose. Domestic photography seems to shape the process of selecting, excluding, representing episodes of family life. It has become common for all people to exclude such unattractive huge parts of life as hard daily work, domestic activities, trivial actions such visits to supermarket or cleaning. Domestic photography gave people a chance to represent themselves as they want to be seen and represented in the eyes of the others. So photography allowed building narratives, telling the whole family stories in the way they have to be told. However, it turned out that stories still needed social shaping because public demands documentation of certain moments and episodes of family life (Slater, 1991, 36). Thus, according to Slater, domestic photography seems to depict endless happy period of family life: holidays, vacations, family gathering around the fireplace. All dressed smartly and smiling, representing pure family idyll. That is why many theorists claim that domestic photography made this genre of visual art trivial and put it into frames (Slatter, 1991, 37). That is how seemingly positive phenomenon as cameras availability has distorted the image making it more democratic but affecting its credibility. Nevertheless every process bears positive as well as negative consequences and transformation of family history narration will further take place. Mass Photography in Citizen Journalism There appeared a completely new and unexpected way to utilize mass photography – as a means of creating political, country history and influencing current state events. Stuart Hall suggests that photography can be the way to write unofficial narrative of important events depicting it from the perspective of ordinary witnesses. So there is a possibility to read photographs “politically” and to see new aspects of people`s life which would otherwise remain silent (Holland, 1991, 73). Citizen journalism has become a necessary attribute of digital culture: it is created by people who received access to large auditoriums online and the possibility to share images, videos, posts start using this opportunity at once. It turned out that user-generated content can be exceptionally important in critical situations when professional journalists are unable to see the events from within and report from the epicenter. Most media workers claim that engaging viewers and users to content production is not an option any more, it is urgency. That is how citizen journalism turned out to be an important tool of political process regulation as in the events during Arab Spring (Rutgiliano, 2008, 116). So today having camera is getting equal to being a journalist because most devices allow taking high quality photos, videos while social networks allow expressing thought in written form. Media managers claim that they are forced to refer to ordinary people for materials today very often, and thus yesterday viewers have become active participants of the process of journalism and photojournalism in particular. The events that happened in South Asia in 2004 prove that fact best. Gigantic tsunami hit the shore so unpredictably that hundreds of people (holiday makers generally) were caught in a trap. It turned out that the majority of information regarding the situation was achieved with the help of “accidental journalists” through their videos and camera snapshots uploaded to social media accounts. A number of newspapers marked the appearance of citizen journalism at that time due to the fact that news agencies became dependent on simple people in search of information. At that time reporters, producers, and professional cameramen sent by their editions went not to the places of catastrophe but to the airports and hotels to find the witnesses of disaster that could share their videos (Allan & Thorsen, 2009, 67). That is how photography evolution contributed to creation of new form of journalism, more popular, more effective, and closer to unprofessional people democratizing the image itself. In this aspect representational ability of a photograph to serve as a document rather than a piece of art played a decisive role. Photography Which Gives Pleasure of Producers Internet has also changed how people viewed photography: it became possible not only take pictures but demonstrate them to large auditory. That is how the concept of prosumerism spread on the photography: users do not longer consume visual content, they produce it and share it with the help of websites and social networks where they can receive instant feedback on their work (Toffler, 1980, 45). In the XXI century photography gained new meaning: it became a means of communication as photographers received possibility to upload their pictures to social networks, such as Facebook or Twitter communicating themselves to the world. To understand the capacity of such resources it is possible to imagine that Facebook for instance contains more than 20 billion of photos of its users and they are literally available to everyone (Beaumont, 2010). So this incredible amount is shared between numerous users equally which can be regarded as another contribution to “democracy of the image”. All those who are connected to the web have common access to these photos so they can manipulate them in any way they like. The principle of common budget accessible to everyone has turned photography into some kind of mass production, nevertheless, brought freedom to an image allowing people to build connections and become closer. Moreover, on the modern level of photography development it became possible to edit photos professionally or almost professionally with special programs. And now high quality editing is available to anyone connected to the Internet. A number of sites offer possibilities to change and modify images getting rid of all the minor faults and making amateur photos closer to professional (Beaumont, 2010). When ordinary people started editing their photos of dogs and flowers on Instagram the boundary between professionals and amateurs started blurring. The distance between users and creators, richer and poorer started shortening with everyone receiving a chance to be heard and seen in the Internet. Artistic Value of Photograph However, photograph was and still remains controversial. Mechanical capacity of a photograph to capture the reality opposes physical duration of the object. Moreover, according to Benjamin, photography lacks authenticity in the sense that authenticity demonstrates how transformation of the object correlates with its historical testimony. In a photograph there are no authentic people and objects as they are retrieved from temporal context. “Of the countless movements of switching, inserting, pressing and the like, the snapping of the photographer has had the greatest consequences. A touch of the finger now sufficed to fix an event for an unlimited period of time. The camera gave the moment a posthumous shock, as it were” (1970, 64). According to Benjamin, one of the earliest theorists of photography, this type of art is transforming the way how society sees culture, it is making it more convergent and more interactive. Images now cannot be separated from other forms of art, from communication (1970, 77). Despite denial of authenticity a photograph gives the only opportunity to show the past, to document elusive moments of life. However, its primary ability to show reality slightly distorted, and slightly more beautiful than it is is absolutely stunning. That is why such fast and wide spread of photography resulted in appearance of more visual artists. Photography has become a pure visual art in which depiction of reality and its documentation has lost its primary significance. Fashion, travelling magazines made artistic photography goods for selling. Photography has turned into a product as people learned how to evoke the most subtle and beautiful emotions with its help (Fine Art Photography, 2011). Therefore, the development of photography has truly contributed to “democracy of image”. When lower and middle classes achieved possibility to use photography in their mundane life that changed everything. Domestic photography has become a compulsory element of every special occasion making photography trivial, using its documentary possibilities. This affordability and accessibility helped to reach certain equality in representation of different layers of society democratizing it. Moreover, with the appearance of citizen journalism, a concept that involves ordinary people in creating of professional content, photography gave chance to all people influence even political events in the world. It also blurred a boundary between professionals and amateurs because most of users received chance to edit their photos professionally on the Internet. However, artistic value of the photograph was also utilized by publishing media using visual capacities of the photograph. So affordability, equality, common access to professional and amateur photography made this phenomenon change the perception of the image itself making it absolutely more democratic. References Allan, S., & Thorsen, E. (2009). Citizen journalism: global perspectives. Peter Lung Publishing: New York. Benjamin, W. (1970). The Work of Art in the Age of Mass Reproduction, in Illuminations. Davis, H. & Walton, P. (1983). Language, Image, Media. New York: St. Martin`s Press Fine Art Photography. (2011). Visual Arts. Retrieved from: http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/fine-art-photography.htm Holland, P. (1997). Sweet it is to scan. Personal photographs and popular photography’, in Wells, L (ed.), Oral History, 18 (2). Rutgiliano, L. (2008). Covering the unknown city: citizen journalism and the marginalized society. Chicago: Arbor Pubishing Slater, D. (1991). Consuming Kodak’, in Family snaps, the meaning of domestic photography, JStore. Tagg, J. (1988). The Burden of Representation. Essays on Photographies and Histories. Toffler, A. (1980). The Third Wave: The Classic Study of Tomorrow. New York, NY: Bantam Read More