John E. O'Connor's Image as Artifact struck me about how media images not only contribute to the documentation of our ongoing history but actually shapes that history by shaping our perception and understanding of events.
As individuals and different hierarchies of communities we consume and are purveyors of images, whether in still photography or moving images on the theater big screen or television or the many artistic forms that our society allows. In the age of digital media, the proliferation of images has multiplied exponentially. With the Internet, images are now available globally except in regimes that severely restrict access to all the sites.
One effect of this rampaging distribution is a sea-change in the role of newspapers and magazines, and journalism in general. In America we flip from one TV channel to another and see and hear the same news items. It makes us wonder if the Fourth Estate does not provide us our window into unfolding history. Why be satisfied with canned content when we can go directly to the place and people affected by these events and hear and see what people there are recording and broadcasting via the Internet? With the digitization of images, photography is losing its link with veracity, the same link that made other visual artists question if photography was art or simply the recording of lightwaves.
I for one no longer call what I produce photographs but images. When we can change what we see in the picture, we are no longer dealing with dependable records of actual confluences of light and sound energies. How many of us realize this about the images we see?
O'Connor is right in reminding us to apply the humanist principles of the historian to our ingestion of media images. We must use critical judgment as well as emotions that we not only enjoy these images but recognize how they are products of people's perception and interpretation that we retain our independence, to the extent we are able to, living immersed as we are in our goldfish-bowl cultures.
Ascending to the Acropolis at Lindos, Rhodes 2007
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