Reading Discussion

Villem Flusser, Toward A Philosophy of Photography

This writing cover three stages of human civilization, which are linear images, technical image and post industrialization (digital world).

When it comes to linear image age, there are several interpretation impressed me the most:
1. Images are significant surfaces.
2. The meaning of the image as it is disclosed by scanning, then, is the synthesis of two intentions: the one manifest in the image itself, the other in the observer.
3. Images offer room for interpretation.
4. Images have magical meaning
5.Images are meditations between man and world.

At this stage image is abstract and linear.

Then it is Technical Image Age. This is when camera and photography come into being. Texts kill imagination, while image provides inspiration. Images became a powerful tool and started to appear in newspaper and media. 

1. Techni-cal images, for their part, are third-degree abstractions; they are abstracted from texts, which in turn are abstracted from images which were themselves abstracted from the concrete world.

2. The function of technical images is to emancipate their receivers from the need to think conceptually, by substituting an imagination of the second degree for conceptualization. 

3. Technical images were meant, first, to re-introduce images into daily life; second, to render hermetic texts imaginable; and third, to render visible the subliminal magic inherent in cheap texts.

4. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, man was surrounded by tools; after the Industrial Revolution, it-was the machine that was surrounded by men.

Camera as an apparatus is programmed. photographic camera illustrates this robotization of work, as well as the liberation of man for playing. The camera is an intelligent tool because it automatically produces pictures. 

Every program functions for the sake of a higher meta-program, and the programmers of a particular, program are functionnaires of that meta-program.

Last stage is the post industrial ages, the digital world where we are now. We easily observe the characteristic of all post-industrial society: it is not he who owns the hard objects, but he who controls the software, who in the end holds the value.

Power has shifted from the owners of the objects to the programmers and operators. 

There is no doubt that technology advancement provides us convenience in creating new forms of art and pictures. Personally, I am not a big fan of abstract or purely composed photos, like making photo-shopped pictures without even touch the camera. To me, it loses its core value and spirit.  

Roland Barthes 

Extracts from Camera Lucida

In the first ten chapters, Roland interprates photography in a philosophic way. In the beginning, he mentioned that it is hard to separate between cinema and photography as art forms. And then he said that photography is unclassifiable. It is an ambiguous or a board definition of photography work. Especially, when comes to some of the snapshot work of Jeff Wall, which seems to be too ordinary. 

Photograph carries its referent and can be either subjective or objective.Some of his words is kind of hard to follow, because of technical terms and inconsistent topics. He has a deep understanding of intent of photography, while he thinks himself being impatient to be a photographer.

As a summary, in my point of view, photography is either a subjective way to document your personal life and fulfill some kind of enjoyment or a objective method to express some notions to the public. A photograph work can be categorized into many styles, and it depends a lot on how viewers interprets the work. 



Hito Steyerl
In Defense of the Poor Image

Living in the era of technology, everybody can both be producer and consumer in term of imaging making.

Poor image can still exist, one is that it transforms quality into accessibility, the other it is because that they are cheap. In the aesthetic stand point, it tends towards abstraction which is a visual idea in its very becoming.

It reminds me of the size limit when uploading files on the internet. For example, uploading transcript for school application, the resolution can be low enough as long as the information on the transcript is legible. It is the information that values the most, but not how clear the image would be.

In addition, poor images, as mentioned in the imperfect cinema, is striving to overcome the divisions of labor within class society. It merges art with life and science, blurring the distinction between consumer and producer, audience and author. Sometimes, when we watch home made family videos with low resolutions online, it brings sort of closeness to us as if we are part of the video.

However, poor images the lack of resolution attests to their appropriation and displacement. As discussed in movies A Remix Manifesto, copyright is a dark side of poor images. As an architectural student, when we are doing rendering, most of time we pick high resolution images to make the audiences think that we are the producer.

The article ends as "In short: it is about reality". Everything exists for a reason, we can't assign any negative attitudes towards them just because of the low resolution.