Very often sudden turnabouts in biographies of the world's celebrities are predestined by a nervous drone of a paparazzi camera, and princesses that try to avoid and escape it perish in metropolitan tunnels. As do secret love stoties that succumb to the click of a camera's shuttle that materializes any evidence of passion and drives secret lovers into the visual publicity of the world.
|
|
Sometimes the effect of a released camera shuttle could be even more penetrating than that of a photo image, as this sonic moment transforms the world we experience into a world-object and materializes everything that is called fate; it also makes pos-sible new developments of another and different story that only takes place in one's mind, one's imagination būt at the same time is fatal, vital. The story is interrupted by a photo image. Its' blatancy and non compliance with any interpretations establishes an imperative course of one's thoughts and events, over-bears feelings, laws and authority rulings, makes them exigent as it was in the case of the aforementioned photographs of the Iraci warprisoners.
In this respect a photograph is not just an image, a visual reality that provokes thought, integrates body affect with an image experience, būt something that is heard, that penetrates one's body likę a sharp, pensive, vulgar, exhibitionistic or nar-cissistic, loving, suicidal or fatal sound. A sound of an appara-tus, mechanics, objectivity and inhumanity. A sound as a fact, stating that the line is crossed, that after this moment every-thing will be different - potentially, būt different. That the world has changed, that we have changed, as we are no longer just individuals, būt objects of attention, ridicule, abuse and admira-tion for others and ourselves.
As we abandon our doubts and the statė of transition for static photo images, and the suspense and instability of our feelings for their symbols and signs, we feel both stronger and more humiliated and impotent at the same time. Having lost our identity we fmd it again, būt at an insurmountable distance that is best conveyed by photographic representations of our un-recognizable, strange faces and bodies.
Būt this moving explication of one's otherness and place-ment at the stops of the Internet highways is a manifestation of an endless discovery of one's self. It often contains modesty and brutality, amazement and shame, cynicism and importunity, būt constitutes just a first step into the optical machinery of one's re-making, those endless transformations that take place at the speed of light and have the fatal effect of a moment, thanks to the modern digital technologies.
Hovvever, we have to admit that the process is endless as there is nothing to discover, and we can only enact certain roles, replace them, multiply signs of our spirituality or corporeality, gender or transcendence, avoiding an ultimate identification with any one of them because we consider ourselves to be "something more" than just this or that image. Moreover, the process is expanded by the conceivable world of photo images that we identify ourselves with, fili our boring Internet afternoons, si-lently envy leafing through shiny pages of numerous maga-zines or kili our time exploring billboards in terminais.
2.
Būt burying the time that we irredeemably loose in the same terminais or numerous life stops we get our last chance to get in touch with a book, a text or the literary world: we get to write an amazingly laconic SMS message and try to make amends for the things we have done. Hovvever, this "creative" impulse is facing its death, the sentence of the visual world, as an SMS message is displaced by a MMS message, i.e., a possibility to communi-cate in pictures, to take photos and send them anyvvhere ydų want by a mobile phone. A new stage of communication - even more intense, true and realistic - has begun.
Though MMS messages replace SMS messages, they are characterized by the same extremely narrow, banal and mundane content of the SMS messages.
Writing SMS messages we are sometimes able to "sąueeze out" a metaphor limited by its word number or abilities of our thumb. In the case of the MMS we do not need it as the reality vvhooshes in without any code, metaphor or a simple know-how. Just the way it is - the reality of a zero meaning. It acąuires meaning only when it is created by us as a ways and means of communication and interaction.
A telephone conversation is superseded by messages, messages - by photo images that, in turn, would be superseded by
video recordings and on-line transmissions. As the main aim of communication is immediacy, sociality, instantaneous connec-tion and a possibility to share your vvorld with the others at the very same moment, without deliberation, "living out" or re-cod-ing. In that case what is left to decode in our images, what is the message?
The slogan of the Sony digital video cameras' promotion campaign "Stop staring - shoot!" could be applied to almost all modern digital photo cameras, as almost every of them is eąuipped with a film mode or at least with an opportunity to record sounds of the photographed environment. There is no need to gape and search for a good shot, you just switch on the camera and let it "scan" the reality. The smart sucker of images will also select the most interesting shots, hence the name "photosmart". There is no doubt that the expansion of the photo camera industry will get more and more intense as we believe that any photo image "shot" by a mobile phone or a profes-sional photo camera should not be devoid of meaning; more-over, that those images depict us, our environment, or just the things we "saw". According to J. Baudrillard, there is a general believe that any visual information speeds up the circulation of meaning encoded in it and produces the surplus value of an image.
It is believed that visual information creates inter-human communication and it is universally agreed that even if a huge amount of it is thrown to the winds and rapidly gets out of date, a certain surplus of meaning is accumulated in time and it dis-perses through all gaps of the socium - as it is commonly agreed that production of material goods increases wealth and sočiai well being despite all set-backs or irrational decisions.
We are the schemers of this myth of accumulation of value and meanings - without it any confidence in the sočiai organiza-tion of our society would be completely destroyed. Būt, accord-ing to the aforementioned philosopher, it is, in fact, crumbling for the very same reason. We believe that information produces meaning, būt it is vice versa. Visual information that accumu-lates in huge ąuantities at the speed of a lightening gobbles up its own contents. It gobbles up communication and sociability polluting it with the flow of visual promotional information that is never-ending, transnational and globai, that usurps all sociability and overleaps all differences of national languages. That flow does not send a meaningful message; it only imitates communication and produces endless flashing būt hollow effects of meaning. As this communication is regulated by funds, trusted by authorities, meant for a mass consumer and dictated by the elite groups.
3.
Such communication sinks in "objective" photographs by reporters in the pages of life-style magazines, billboards or tour-ist albums. Būt, according to philosopher M. Foucault, this is just a visual mechanism that reproduces and enforces authorities' relations, where an image's function is not to depict reality būt to represent the visual distribution of order among the cul-tural elite, authorities, money, and power. In a modern society of spectacle both merge on the plane of an advertising image būt the advertising itself is not enriched.
Though all original forms of the bygone and present cul-ture are absorbed in advertising, it is the form of an image's visual surface that triumphs over - the smallest denominator of all meanings, a zero point of a meaning. Visual entropy prevails as it has overborne any tropes generating meaningful tension of an image and chosen a pensively boring space of idle repeti-tions devoid of any imagination. According to J. Baudrillard, this is the lowest forai of a visual sign's energy, as in advertising all specific contents are annulled at the very moment they can be ovenvritten with each other.
There is a striking unanimity about our feelings over advertising: "I've seen it", "it has been done before", "just a substitute", "mundane and vulgar". Advertising is no longer rated together with a merchandise, object or service; it is seen in the context of "already made" and consumed image.
This is a constant tragic race of an advertising image with itself, with its impossibility and necessity at the same time.
4.
On the other hand, the invasion of such blatantly dynamic and self-negating advertising images is very characteristic to the modern art photography - tabloid format, intensity, colors, immediacy, confrontation, Eros, shock, seduction and ambigu-ous rejection, nostalgia and challenge fuse together art and advertising, culture and market, privacy and publicity; any alter-ative or the "aesthetic of ugliness" is immediately neutralized by the need of the liberal market for a more shocking suggestion of an advertising image and its uniąueness, and integrated into the same endless dance of advertising image's mimicry.
The penetration of the so-called ąsočiai images into advertising is obvious - discourses of pedophilia and fetishism, por-nography and zoophilia, aggression and terrorism are working their way into publicity through all gaps in the market that ab-sorbs any alternatives and differences, and are socialized as accents of a promotion campaign. The result is an even greater neutralization and devaluation of any attempts of contemporary post modern artists to become marginally shocking and privi-leged suppliers of such ąsočiai imagery to the elite market of art consumers at any price.
Transient efforts of artists to occupy billboards and screens, as well as the attempts of advertising specialists to take over all extravagant art ideas and ūse them in their promotions confirm one very simple fact: these worlds are no longer self-contained and independent, they share the rhetoric of a photographic image, society's consumerist relation with the visual world, and the dictate of wealth that leaves its imprint everywhere. According to B. Groys, only he (not God) could unite into one unani-mous whole the worlds of culture, politics, and sociality, to lend the reality a new power of plasticity and alternation, flexibility and transformation, which is characteristic to the transnational capital and the international market of ideas and images.
Būt from then on discourses of visual culture loose their magical power, the inner intensity of their images, and have to convey the tensions and cravings of the market world. How they could be outsmarted by a photographer's individual creative urge, are his urges congruous or conflicting - these are the things that a photographer feels when he is setting his camera or releasing the shutter. He knows which world has been deprived of its opportunities and which one has been expanded by a single click.
5.
And finally, a bit of statistics. Since the sixties of the XX century all photography has been gradually decontextualized, centralized, and commercialized. It has been brought over and
scanned through by several monopolistic banks of image data-banks: The Image Bank, Comstock, Getty Images, and later Corbis, Index Stock or Gaze. These are transnational corpora-tions that inflict their working principles on all national store-houses of image as they have huge capital at their disposition both accumulating and processing the heritage of world's photography. Only photographs' scanning costs for the Getty Images Corporation in 1998 reached 13 million dollars. The Corbis Corporation spends about 220 millions of dollars on the digitali-zation of Bettmann's archives. The profit from the rights on photographs' reproduction, their digitalization and circulation on the Internet reaches billions of dollars. For instance, the income of the Index Stock in 2000 was 2,5 billions of dollars. These and similar corporations decide how the world is and would be visu-alized, what motives we will see in various products of design, advertising and mass media, what photographs will be market-able and what will be not. Is it not a photographic fascism? You just have to leaf through the Comstock catalogue and the truth is evident. And what could our glorious school of Lithuanian photography do in this context?
