still images

Mitchell Stephens'  feisty The rise of the image the fall of the word (New York, Oxford Uni Press 98) argues that at some point during the past fifty years "for perhaps the first time in human history it began to seem as if images would gain the upper hand over words." 

In considering the revolution made by still images (prints, photographs) and moving images (film) start with 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', Walter Benjamin's 1936 classic. It's available in Illuminations (New York, Schocken 85) translated by Harry Zohn. 

     the print

William Ivins in Prints & Visual Communication (Cambridge, Harvard Uni Press 53) argues that the discovery of ways for " making exactly repeatable pictorial statements" in the first half of the fifteenth century was of profound historical importance, surpassing the invention of printing with movable metal type. Prints added a visual component to communication. That they were exactly the same provided a powerful new way of transmitting knowledge. Before, with reliance on words, descriptions of nature and art were often very imprecise.

That thesis is explored in Hillel Schwartz's A Culture of Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (Cambridge, Zone Books 97) and The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology In The First Age of Print (London, Routledge 00) edited by Neil Rhodes & Jonathan Sawday. There's a general survey in Susan Lambert's The Image Multiplied (New York, Abaris 87). 

Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and other writings highlighted in our design guide provide a demonstration.

Patricia Anderson's The Printed Image & the Transformation of Popular Culture 1790-1860 (Oxford, Clarendon Press 94) and Ralph Shikes' The Indignant Eye (Boston, Beacon 76) deal with consumption and politics respectively. Other pointers are found in the illustration page of our detailed profile on print culture.

For more recent times Neil Harris' Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites & Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago, Uni of Chicago Press 90) characterises the half tone revolution of 1850-1900 as having the same impact .

     photography

Ivins notes that print making was imprecise: engravers often did not have first-hand experience with the object represented and the rendering was at best an approximation. That changed with the invention of photography:

never in the history of men has there been a more complete revolution than that which has taken place since the middle of the nineteenth century in seeing and visual recording. Photographs give us visual evidence about things that no man has ever seen or ever will see directly. A photograph is today accepted as proof of the existence of things and shapes that never would have been believed on the evidence of a hand-made picture ... Photography brought a catastrophic revolution, the extent of which is not even today fully recognized.

That revolution, catastrophic or otherwise, is examined in Estelle Jussim's Visual Communication & the Graphic Arts: Photographic Technologies in the Nineteenth Century (London, Bowker 74) and Richard Rudisill's Mirror Image: The Influence of the Daguerrotype on American Society (Albuquerque, Uni of New Mexico Press 71).

There's a more general exploration in Susan Sontag's On Photography (London, Allen Lane 77) and in Photography & Society (London, Gordon Fraser 80) by master photographer Gisela Freund.

James Ryan's Picturing Empire Photography & the Visualisation of the British Empire (London, Reaktion 97) is suggestive.


     next page  (film)