Ideas on Language and Photography (after reading Rosalind Krauss)
Looking at photography is reading signs of the real.
Reality may never look like the photographic depiction.
The photograph is merely a record of signals.
Where are these signals coming from?
(look at quantum physics theories vs heidegger vs religious stories of creation)
Unless they’re in some physical or mental dungeon, images surround and (something between greet and confront) all urban dwellers now.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy is correct. To be effective human individuals, we must at least know how to decipher the flood of signals we receive. Most of these come as recorded optical signals that create images in the brain. These images are a new code or source of knowledge. The skill to decipher them becomes more essential everyday.
Now, there are many image languages, spun off from movements and schools after the Pictorialists (c.1890) and Photo-Secession (c.1907). It is then tempting to say, making photographs is a new way of writing. It isn’t. It is a democratization of the language. Making photographs is more akin to running a printing press. It is the ability to duplicate a record of signals that must be decoded, even the images made purposely for pure aesthetic sensation (patterns, textures, ‘beauty’, erotica). Reaction to aesthetic sensation IS the primal decoding ability.
Now, with inexpensive cameras, internet connections and cameraphones, nearly everyone will be a photographer, or more appropriately - pixelgrammer. As with other languages, many can operate it, but few do so eloquently. The eloquent ones call themselves Photographers. Who decides what is eloquent? Traditional institutions and publications are still important, but networked communities and markets can be as important. To some, it is more important.
Twitter
Another signal is the Written Spoken language (the current manner of speaking and the concurrent way it is written). What reminds me of its significance is Twitter. A twitter/tweet stream, is a new writing form that can reflect the current way of speaking. (Add it to the list containing Poetry, some Novels, Magazine Articles, and Song Lyrics) It’s a realtime or immediate form of writing to many, and is normally consumed as such. It would be interesting to read a 5 year stream of tweets. Or, if it’s still a viable form, 50-60 years of tweets. What a record of language and culture that would be!
Twitter Followings are also a new form of entertainment and community formation. More importantly as discussed by Bill Thompson on BBC News, it is also a form of expanded awareness, as individual twitters become network nodes. As a twitter contributes thoughts and sensations, yo profits more, and sometimes enormously with that greatly expanded awareness, assembled by the accumulation of connections to other twitters.
Will it become commercialized?
So what?
All this build up of options and capability to express ourselves is all working towards Our ultimate control of our reality. This list includes music, texts, sculpture, painting, architecture, photography, power production, motion pictures, computing, digital interfaces and industrial design. Whether the communal environment or the individually customized reality becomes dominant is unimportant now. Developments in tools and customs need to play out further. It might become an unavoidable cultural and social issue in the future. Its effects on livelihoods or market structures might be even more significant.
Someday I will elaborate more on these points. Feel free to send more ideas and suggestions here or let me know who you are on Twitter.