Assignment 7

 

 

 

 

^^my poster for HW.

I found this week’s reading to be tricky. I think what he’s mapping out is the difference in the way we humans think about images vs. language. My summary/q’s follow:

A long time ago, humans communicated in cave-painting-like ways, with murals loaded with symbolism, which viewers could decode using their imaginations/consciousness. Then came written linear language, which situated communication with respect to time & causalities. But then I don’t really understand what he means by historical images. I know he’s referring to pre-printing press, but I guess I would love some examples of images that illustrate/penetrate text to fill them with imagination.

Then, I think he’s saying, there was a premium on language-thinking with the invention of the printing press, and images (now photographs), had to fall into a more language-thinking category to be relevant, by being informative and easily distributed.

Then I think he’s saying that there’s this division/confusion between scientific truth and subjective art and that the definition of photography gets kind of muddled in there. I don’t understand why he refers to them as historical dams. Is it because they complicate/inject imagination into an objective-seeming-language-based thought process?

I don’t really understand how negative entropy fits in (when I looked it up, it sounds like it means “order”?).

Then he argues that photographs concretize rather than abstract — because they have the appearance of reality. So he calls them posthistorical. But by that definition, wouldn’t they be more in line with documenting history?

Then he uses a bunch of complicated words for what I think he means as “photographer” and “viewer” — (“programmers” v “addressees”). He says that the photographer actually captures models of perception and experience, and the potentials of an “alternative future” — which makes sense to me. He susses out the disparity between the experience of the image-maker, and that of the viewer, who looks towards a photograph as the “end points of history”– aka something concrete, illustrative. Then he talks about this disparity at large between forms of communication and coding between the elite and the illiterate throughout history, which is very interesting. I think, ultimately, he is arguing for the democratization of photography and for everyone to be able to interact with images on equal footing.

Is that the case? What does he mean by synthetic images? Non-film based?

What would he think of the world today where most people have a mobile camera in their pocket at all times?