Chapter Five

Chapter 5: Visual Technologies, Image Reproduction, and the Copy

Technology has made is somewhat easier to reproduce images. Drawings and paintings dominated thousands of years of visual reproduction, but new technologies such as photography have opened up more options for those wishing to recreate or capture an image.
Technology develops in strides but also gradually sometimes. I think it’s really interesting to see how some technologies are used decades later for things you couldn’t have imagined earlier—such as the military technology that morphed into the Internet. Some technologies, such as cell phones, have grown so dramatically over the last decade that I have a hard time seeing how they will develop further until they come out with some feature that at first seems totally superfluous and then becomes standard.
Motion and sequence photography are two of the most drastic advancements in image reproduction. The techniques used in motion picture film and sequential photography opened up many more opportunities for photographic uses, such as studying movement through time-lapsed photography and making films with motion pictures. Sequential photography allowed for studying movement that was too fast for the naked eye to take in and observe.
The idea of a kinescope—a device in which only one person at a time could view a moving picture—seems very strange to us, or at least to me, today. In a way it reminds me of those big binocular things at different tourist spots where you insert coins and then get to look through at a landscape more closely, or those toys where you have a round disk-like card with little pictures on it and you put it into the plastic viewer and scroll through the pictures (I cannot for the life of me remember what these are called).
It’s interesting to think about what could have happened to motion photography if the technology allowing people to view it had not coincided with the technology to produce the motion picture film. However, I can’t really believe that there would have been too much of a gap between these inventions, because throughout history, if there has been a need for an invention, it usually doesn’t take too long for someone to come up with a solution.
It is interesting to note that throughout history, even though copies and the tendency to copy images has existed, the value of an original, uncopied image is usually always more valuable than the copy. This is evidenced today in many ways, such as an original painting by a famous artist selling for millions and millions of dollars, while reproductions are worth relatively little. Today, “hand painted” items are usually always going to be more costly than items that are not original or painted by hand.
I found the idea that “authenticity” has come to mean something that is “timeless” or “classic” instead of something unique or original to be interesting and seemingly contradictory at first. Although, I can’t help but admit that this is true especially in advertising today, where mass-produced items are deemed “authentic.”
The section talking about how some works are so universally reproduced, such as the Mona Lisa, made me think of how many times I have seen that image copied and reproduced. One of my favorite instances is in one of my favorite movies—Elf—where the main character uses and Etch-A-Sketch to draw the picture and hangs it on a Christmas tree. The joke implies that most people will understand that this particular image has been reproduced so many times that we are almost desensitized to its beauty.
Whoever owns a copyright literally has the right to copy that image. Today, copyright laws are so important to artists, writers, and in many other areas because some people make a living from the images, writings, music they have created.
The copyright section was interesting to me, as a amateur photographer. I participate in photography as a hobby now, but one day hope to learn enough and develop my skills and craft enough to do something with it (and as I’ve been put in charge of the wedding photography for my cousin’s wedding this March, it’s a goal that doesn’t seem as unattainable as it once did). Since I’ve made a transition from film to digital photography, I have always been apprehensive about putting my pictures on the Internet, since I have no way to keep people from using the images for their own purposes. I put the pictures on the Internet in the first place to show them to people I would like to see them, and it’s the easiest and most accessible way to do that, especially when communicating with people hundreds of miles away. But at the same time, there’s nothing to stop anyone from right-clicking and saving the images to their computer. Sure, the images won’t be high resolution at all, but the idea is still there, and it’s a bit of an unsettling thing to think about.