Hito Steyerl – In Defense of the Poor Image
Poor images show the rare, the obvious, and the unbelievable – that is, if we can still manage to decipher it.
"Focus is identified as a class position, a position of ease and privilege, while being out of focus lowers one's value as an image."
"The contemporary hierarchy of images, however, is not only based on sharpness, but also and primarily on resolution." Personally, I like this phrase a lot, indeed, nowadays people tend to focusing on how much pixel a camera can produce, and resolution is the key determination of how far can you "zoom in" to the frame. No matter how sharp an image is, not to say that over sharpened image is bad, one cannot make over the pixels that image does not have.
Poor images are poor because they are not assigned any value with in the class society of images – their status as illicit or degraded grants them exemption from its criteria.
"Users become the editors, critics, translators, and (co-)authors of poor images."
Poor images are thus popular images – images that can be made and seen by the many.
By losing its visual substance it recovers some of its political punch and creates a new aura around it. This aura is no longer based on the permanence of the "original." but on the transience of the copy.
The poor image is no longer about the real thing – the originally original. In short, it is about reality.
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Roland Barthe – Extracts From Camera Lucida (Chapter 1-10)
Life consists of these little touches of solitude.
"I decided I liked Photography in opposite to the Cinema, from which I nonetheless failed to separate it.
What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.
A photograph cannot be transformed (spoken) brother.
"For there to be a sign there must be a mark."
A photograph can be the object of three practices (or of three emotions. or of three intentions): to do, to undergo, to look. The operator is the Photographer. The Spectator is ourselves, all of us who glance through collections of photographs.
Technically, Photography is at the intersection of two quite distinct procedures; one of a chemical order: the action of light on certain substances; the other of a physical order: the formation of the image through an optical device.
"Ultimately, what I am seeking in the photograph taken of me (the 'intention' according to which I look at it) is Death: Death is the eidois of that Photograph. Hence, strangely, the only thing that I tolerate, that I like, that is familiar to me, when I am photographed, is the sound of the camera."
Personally, I am very into in the phrase "the sound of the camera". Indeed, I believe that the sound of a camera, whether is the shutter sound, the dial sound, or the rolling sound when winding films, the sound is that camera's unique characteristic and can be memorized after working with that camera for a period of time. It could be weeks or days for a person to remember that sound, even maybe seconds if the sound a camera makes is so emotional and attractive. Take myself as an example, I own a Hasselblad 500C/M medium format film camera. I bought that camera not only because I like the look of it, they way you operate it, and the experiences of shooting film very much, but also for it makes a very unique and special shutter sound that just makes feel very satisfied and addicted to it.
"For me, the Photographer's organ is not his eye (which terrifies me) but his finger: what is linked to the trigger of the lens, to the metallic shifting of the plates (when the camera still has such things). I love these mechanical sounds in an almost voluptuous way, as if, in the Photograph, they were the very thing -and only thing -to which my desire clings, their abrupt click breaking through the mortiferous layer of the Pose."
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Villem Flusser – Toward Philosophy of Photography (Chapter 1-3)
Human civilization has seen two fundamental turning points since its beginnings.
The first occurred approx. during the second half of the second millennium, B.C., and may be defined as "The invention of linear writing". The second – we are witnessing it – may be called "The invention of technical images".
The purpose of the essay: not to defend an extant thesis, but to contribute to a discussion about the subject "photography" in a philosophical spirit.
Images are significant surfaces. by reducing its four dimensions of space-plus-time to the two dimensions of a plane.
Images offer room for interpretation. Images are meditations between man and world.
What is involved here is a kind of oblivion. Man forgets that he produces images in order to find his way in the world; he now tries to find his way in images. He no longer deciphers his own images, but lives in their function. Imagination has become hallucination.
The purpose of texts is to explain images, to trans-code image elements and ideas into concepts. Texts are meta-codes of images.
Text become more imaginative, and images become more conceptual.
Historically, traditional images may be called "pre-historical", while technical images may be called "post-historical". Onto-logically, traditional images mean phenomena, while technical images mean concepts.
Civilization split three ways: one for the "fine arts", nourished by traditional images enriched by concepts; one for science and technology, nourished by hermetic texts; and one for the masses, nourished by cheap texts.
Technical images were meant, first, to reintroduce images into daily life; second, to render hermetic texts imaginable; and third, to render visible the subliminal magic inherent in cheap texts. In fact, however, technical images do not function in that way. It fail to constitute a common denominator capable of reuniting civilization, as they were meant to do; on the contrary, they grind that civilization into an amorphous mass, and they result in mass civilization.
Nothing can withstand the centripetal attraction of technical images: no artistic, scientific or political act that does not aim at a technical images, no daily common action that does not wish to be photographed or filmed or videotaped. Everything desires to flow into this eternal memory, and to become eternally reproducible there.
We can roughly distinguish between two types of cultural objects. The one is good for consumption ("consumer goods"), the other is good for production of such goods ("tools").
The sciences of nature search for the human intentions hidden in the objects; The science of culture ask not only "why?" as do the natural sciences, but also "what for?".
tools inform objects.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, man was surrounded by tools; after the Industrial Revolution, it was the machine that was surrounded by men. This is the precise meaning of "revolution".
The camera is not a tool, but a toy, and the photographer is not a worker as such, but a player: not "homo faber", but "homo ludens".
It is the soft symbol, not the hard object, which contains value: the "trans-valuation of all values".
Power has shifted from the owners of the objects tot he programmers and operators.
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