Technologies of the Visual

In an often quoted passage in Ways of Seeing, Thomas Berger observes:

The visual arts have always existed within a certain preserve; originally this preserve was magical or sacred. But it was also physical: it was the place, the cave, the building, in which, or for which, the work was made. The experience of art, which at first was the experience of ritual, was set apart from the rest of life--precisely in order to be able to exercise power over it. Later the preserve of art became a social one. It entered the culture of the ruling class, whilst physically it was set apart and isolated in their palaces and houses. During all this history the authority of art was inseparable from the particular authority of the preserve.
What the modern means of reproduction have done is to destroy the authority of art and to remove it--or, rather, to remove its images which they reproduce--from any preserve. For the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free. They surround us in the same way as a language surrounds us. They have entered the mainstream of life over which they no longer, in themselves, have power. (89)

Although Berger is discussing great art, his distrust of contemporary images is a widely held view. Berger is indebted to Walter Benjamin in this selection, but the overall argument has been embraced by conservative and radical social critics. The assumption is that outside of cloistered art, images lack the capacity to encourage deep reflection, serious thought, and even the creation of identity. Instead, they play on the emotions, encourage stereotypes, and at best merely record reality--even though the recording of reality is hardly a simple process.

The recording of reality was a focal problem in Gutenberg's productive years in the middle of the fifteenth century. Some of the great masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance, including Botticelli's La Primavera, were painted on commission from the Medici and other patrons within twenty years of the printing of the 42-line Bible.

La Primavera "Allegory of Spring" (1477-78) painted for the villa of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici at Castello;
now in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.
We know from theoretical treatises from the painters such as Cennino and Alberti at the beginning of the fifteenth century that they took the imitation of natural objects and above all the illusion of three-dimensional space as their goals. The masters of the Italian Renaissance succeeded in establishing a dominant though often challenged ideal of literal naturalism that would not be completely overturned until the advent of photography brought painting into crisis.

Cave painting near the village of Vallon-Pont-d'Arc, France.
Berger's thesis would seem to apply to the earliest known images. For example, an exceptionally important archaeological discovery has recently been made in the ArdËche gorges in southern France, where archaeologists have found vast underground network of caves decorated with paintings and engravings dating from the Paleolithic age. After clearing a narrow passageway at the back of a minor cave, the discoverers made their way down a shaft and came upon a vast untouched network of caverns containing large galleries decorated with paintings and engravings representing animals. More than 200 black or red ochre paintings or engravings have been discovered to date. Depicted are a particularly large and unusual variety of animals (horses, rhinoceros, lions, bison, wild ox, bears, a panther, mammoths, ibex, and an owl) together with symbols. Like the famous cave paintings of Lascaux, these masterpieces were in an isolated setting, which must have contributed greatly to their power as images for their earliest viewers.

Berger explains the loss of authority of great art through mass reproduction, but we often hear the thesis extended to claims that we now live in a culture based on images that is somehow different from our past. This claim is one of the great misperceptions of the alphabetic literacy narrative. Preliterate peoples fashioned many everyday images. We know best only the pieces with most skilled craftsmanship, because they are the ones represented in museums, such as these masks, which were brought to the United States by a group of 120 dancers from the island of Java, who performed at the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893.

Javanese masks in the Field Museum, Chicago.
Less frequently exhibited are thousands of everyday objects from prehistoric and historic cultures. Every known culture, past and present, has a language of images. The primary difference, as Berger points out, is the means of reproduction. The rapid expansion of technologies of reproduction in the nineteenth century brought the modern era of the image. The lithographic stone was discovered by a musician in Munich in 1796 who wanted to reproduce his compositions inexpensively, and it shortly became a means of making posters, announcements, and art. After an improved lithography process was introduced in America beginning with Rudolf Ackermann in 1817, color prints became popular. By the end of the nineteenth century, Toulouse-Lautrec and others brought the potential of the lithograph to fruition, creating beautiful mass-produced art, often in the service of advertising.

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Le Goulue, Poster for the Concert Bol in the Moulin Rouge, 1891.
Most accounts of the book discuss the development of the steam press around 1814 and the rotary press in 1847--both which increased production from about 300 hand-pressed sheets a day to over 12,000 sections--and linotype in 1885, which automated composition and replaced handwork of routine type setting. Along with woodpulp paper, which came about 1875, these technologies made possible mass media. Less noted in histories of printing is the rapid improvement in engraving during the nineteenth century. Wood engravings, which had been replaced by copper, were brought back to illustrate newspapers. In 1804 the Times of London began to feature illustrations. Unlike earlier wood engravings, which were carved with knives, the new generation of wood engravers used the more precise burin. Steel engravings were also introduced by the 1830s, and the overall quality of all engravings increased dramatically by the 1850s. In the United States, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper began in 1855 and the more famous Harper's Weekly in 1857. Both covered the Civil War extensively and featured the work of outstanding artists including Alfred Waud and Winslow Homer.

Books likewise were transformed in the nineteenth century as a new reading public desired to see new lands being discovered and experience new pursuits. The life of the first man to climb the Matterhorn, Edward Whymper, offers an example of how people were also transformed. Whymper was born in London in 1840 as the son of an engraver, and at age fourteen he was apprenticed to his father's business. In 1860 the publisher William Longman, who knew Whymper's work, needed illustrations of the Alps. He commissioned Whymper to draw the then obscure mountains of the Dauphine, where Whymper became a passionate mountaineer. The skill of Whymper's execution brought commissions in following years and enabled him to continue climbing. In 1871 Whymper published Scrambles Amongst the Alps with over 100 of his own engravings. The book popularized mountaineering by potraying visually the mountains and the technology used to ascend them.

Whymper's engraving of his fall on the Matterhorn in 1862.
More accurate engravings brought the desire for even more true-to-life images. As early as the Renaissance, artists aspired to reproduce exactly what they saw. In 1519 Leonardo da Vinci described the camera obscura, and many other artists experimented with it to explore problems of perspective. But it was not until the nineteenth century that technology developed to fix images. The daguerreotype, presented to the Académie des Sciences in Paris in 1839, quickly became a medium of popular portraiture. By 1851 the wet plate process made photography widely available. With their heavy and clumsy equipment, photographers began to document the world around them, including the first photographs of the horrors of warfare.

Remains from the Battle of Cold Harbor, June 3, 1864. Photo taken in April, 1865.
Within a few years, the uses of photography proliferated, extending from art and ethnographic recording to postcards and pornography. In 1889 the first inexpensive Kodak cameras were marketed, made possible by George Eastman's invention of flexible roll film, and by the turn of the century much of America was pasting photographs in family albums. Photographs also became widely distributed consumer objects through the popularity of stereo viewers. A hand-held stereo viewer was introduced at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London's Crystal Palace to the delight of Queen Victoria. In 1856 twin-lens cameras made stereo viewers a long-running consumer fad. From 1860 to 1920, millions of stereo viewers were manufactured and sold. They gave the illusion of three-dimensional solidity, an effect that neither engraving nor painting could achieve. For the first time a visual medium produced the illusion of actually seeing the object itself, conflating the image with reality. The new visual technologies of the photograph and stereoscope were deeply implicated in the expansion of industrial capitalism and colonialism. By making the world visible, it became appropriable and transformable.

The spread of photographs, postcards, and comics in the last decades of the nineteenth century along with the continuing proliferation of posters, illustrated books, and illustrated newspapers brought predictable conservative responses (see Harris). Pictures were accused of offering an overly simplified view of the world, a view that lacked interpretation. Furthermore, photographs could be staged and retouched, thus giving misleading views of reality. Stronger accusations were leveled against the new genre of the comic strip, which began when a staff illustrator, Richard Felton Outcault, working for Joseph Pulitzer's The World, published a one-panel cartoon in 1895 called "Down Hogan's Alley," featuring a gap-toothed, bald little boy in a long frock. Shortly after, The World's printers were experimenting with colored ink and ran a test yellow on the boy's frock. Thus was born "The Yellow Kid," credited as the first comic strip; many others shortly followed. Comics were alleged to corrupt the morals and manners of youth.

R. F. Outcault, "The Yellow Kid," 1895.
Despite these warnings, the invasion of images accelerated. In the twentieth century image technologies have diversified to the extent that makes even a quick sketch impossible. The trajectory of bringing more and better images into printed texts led to the publication of Life in 1936, the first mass-market picture magazine. Even more transformative image technologies had been launched by the time Life appeared. Beginning with Edweard Muybridge's photographic experiment to prove that galloping horses lift all four hooves off the ground at once in 1877, innovations in the photography of movement made motion pictures possible, and the commercial potential was quickly recognized. In the first decade of the twentieth century in Europe and the United States, film companies were created, special theaters were built, and very profitable distribution networks were established. By 1910, twenty-six million Americans were going to the movies at nickelodeon theaters every week (Merritt 86).

Television became technically feasible in 1931 and the BBC began broadcasting televised programs in 1936. In the United States following World War II television grew with the speed of the Internet. The number of sets in use passed one million in 1949 and ten million just two years later. By 1959, fifty million television sets were being watched in the United States. With the development of telecommunications and computer technologies, the potential of television was convincingly demonstrated in live broadcasts from the surface of the moon in 1969. Less spectacular but no less influential has been the expansion of video and audio recording and production technologies to reach mass markets. The majority of American households now have answering machines and VCRs, and many have computers, video cameras, FAX machines, synthesizers, and sophisticated audio equipment. The most powerful combination of these technologies is the World Wide Web, which possesses a massive capacity for distributing images and already is a means for distributing audio and video.

The progression of computer-generated images in motion pictures gives a sense of where we are headed. The first major studio film to use any computer graphics was Futureworld, a 1976 science fiction thriller that computer-mapped head of Peter Fonda on a monitor. Many people think that the battle scenes in Star Wars were created with computer graphics, but actually they were made with small scale models. The first film to use computer graphics to advance a plot line was Tron in 1982, where about twenty minutes of the movie was produced by computers. Tron, however, was a box office flop, and it was not until the 1990s with films like Terminator 2 that the commercial potential of computer grapics in films was realized. In 1995 Disney's Toy Story became the first film with every frame generated by computers.

Compare the computer-generated Disney look of Toy Story with the Disney images I grew up with:

Toy Story, 1995.

Bambi,1941.
Digital humans are now used in dangerous movie stunts formerly performed by people. The era of the virtual actor--the "vactor" or "synthespian"--cannot be far in the future.

Craig Barrett, the chief operating officer at Intel, predicts that shortly the technology of the $75,000 workstation that produced Jurassic Park will cost about $2,000 ("Intel View"). He foresees that PC's in the year 2011 will use a chip that has as many as a billion transistors, compared with about eight million in today's most advanced chip. The Web sites of Ben Syverson, Jessica Draper, and Kate Levy only hint at what might be just around the corner.