The Reality of the Image World: Extending Susan Sontag's "On Photography" (3)

A photo is a story, watching a photo shares a secondhand experience on the ground. But Susan Sontag never lived in the age of digital photos. One point that people today have to consider is that images are not only the carrier of second-hand experience, but also the digital reproduction of the original carrier.

Assuming that everyone's mobile phone screen - the mobile phone screen is very important, imagine the size, color difference, and even the cracks worn by different owners for a long time. These are the "surroundings" of the photos - as a unit To label a digital photo, the number of replicas is inexhaustible. Benjamin believes that mechanical reproduction is "the placement of a copy of the original in an environment that is beyond the reach of the original itself." But this phrase arose in the era when photographs taken on film were printed on paper. The situation today is no longer the relationship between the original (in camera) and its reproduction (photo of the printed photo), but the reproduction (posted on social media/watermarked) and its (secondary transmission/screenshot/ Screen shot while watching the movie) The relationship between the twin replicas. In this way, second-hand experience is further diluted into third-hand and fourth-hand, until the context is completely stripped.

 // Screen shot refers to using a mobile phone to capture the movie screen on the screen when watching a movie in the theater. If you pay attention to the "Youth You" cinema, maybe you can see from the back row that the front row is raised high and aimed at an actor's mobile phone camera.

Today's world is the world of images. However , when returning to the unseasoned reality from the abundant images, one feels that the mouth is dull. On the one hand, reality is less exciting than images. This, in turn, inspires us to create images of every "photographable" moment, proving that our lives are not lackluster. On the other hand, images give an illusory mental satiety. This is what Susan Sontag said in the chapter on Sad Objects: "The hyper-fluid gaze of photography makes the viewer feel at ease, creating a false sense of omnipresence, a deceptively well-informed." We have "seen" Mount Fuji, seen the "African savannah," and browsed "the living conditions of slum dwellers," but we have never seen it.

On the contrary, the new age of infidelity intensified allegiance to the image. I no longer believe in understanding reality in the form of images, but now I believe in understanding reality as images. Feuerbach, in the preface to the second edition of his Essence of Christianity (1843), said of "our age" that it "emphasizes images over reality, copies over originals, representations over reality, and Appearance and lightness of the essence"—while realizing that it is doing so.

- Susan Sontag

Celebrating photography, especially mobile photography, is a celebration of democracy where everyone has the right to create images. In traditional art, "some objects of expression are considered important, profound, and noble, while others are unimportant, trivial, and despicable." Photography brings the whole world, along with its tedium, embarrassment, corruption, and ugliness, onto the stage as material. . Let the camera (mobile phone camera) complete the scenes that you can't bear to draw. And no matter how lightly you press the shutter, photography is inevitably a sight from some pair of eyes. A photograph makes one think about where the photographer is, because photography must have the eyes of the subject. The lens is for people to watch.

This seems to be the same for motion photography. Documentary and film images also have a subject hidden behind the camera. For documentaries, the subject is often the photographer himself, and occasionally the subject. Movies have more possibilities, usually fictional characters, sometimes surveillance cameras, sometimes cryptic ghosts (in the crevices of the closet, on the ceiling, in the gutters - all kinds of places people don't go); trying to break the dimension The film of the wall puts the subject as the director himself. For example, the subject of the image is a bullied boy, which will probably arouse the sympathy of the viewer; if the subject's perspective suddenly switches to a madman, a ghost, or a director who suddenly jumps out of the dimensional wall, it is a reminder to the viewer who cannot substitute for the subject. , creating a sense of detachment or drama.

Creators of moving images have enormous control over their work : for a given few hours, your perspective is at the mercy of the camera. Still images are different. This is because a single image lacks context and cannot exercise control over the viewer—like reading a book, we can control how long we stare at a photo and how we stare at it.

In addition, digital photos can be saved directly for screen captures, actions that further pull a photo out of its own context, allowing viewers to easily modify and republish the image, becoming one of the interpreters in the act of re-enactment. one. Sometimes the communicator has innocent intentions, and other times it may be to create a spectacle and cause a commotion. In short, while the image is recreated, restricted, and tampered with, its authenticity also falls into a mystery.

- also falls into the network of rights defined by Foucault: "Power operates in this network in the form of networks in which individuals not only flow, but they are always both in a position of obedience and exercising power at the same time." In the network of people In , everyone is a media, and everyone defines its images; experiences are copied and recreated.

Instead of merely documenting reality, photographs have become the norm for how things are presented to us, thus changing the notion of reality, and the notion of realism.

- Susan Sontag

The action of the camera to capture a flying bird is very brief, but it has created an invisible physical relationship between the image of the flying bird and the flying bird: the image of the flying bird has indexicality, which makes people index the bird itself. A truth claim was born with photography, the belief that traditional photography always faithfully portrays reality. In fact, at one point photography became a rhetoric to describe something "exactly true". (Otherwise, we wouldn't be so angry when "the real thing doesn't match the picture".) Photography is a thinly sliced fresh reality.

The trust in photography is also transferred to the moving image. Movies have an old name: motion pictures. If the still picture merely captures a moment that simultaneously conceives the past and the future, cinema truly captures both the past and the future. Lev Manovich calls it the art of the index. Encountering rare spectacles—a sunset, a parting, an earthquake—everyone murmured "it's like a movie" while sighing.

Today, though, it's more common for us to acquiesce when photography and film are unreal, and it's not just photography and film that have been technically processed in post. This is because "life is not about some meaningful detail, illuminated by a flash and frozen forever." The photo is. The images re-represent a layer of reality by removing the noise that the senses receive when people are present. This erasure can be done in very simple steps: framing, rotating crop, color correction, and even erasing.

Thanks to technological progress and commercial waves, noise can not only be erased, but also "one-click erasure." Photo post-processing software not only simplifies these links, but also standardizes and automates them. Desserts have special tones; summer has its own filters; the ambience needed for shooting natural scenery and portraits is also carefully created; there are also facial spots and wrinkles that disappear. Not only the photo post software, but the medium in which the photo is presented is also driving this standard process - each 16:9, 2:3, 3:4, 5:4 format photo is equally distributed into a 1:1 mold , become one of the 2x2, or 3x3 squares.

 //If there is standardization, there are willful creators who try to get rid of this standard: add white borders on the top and bottom of the banner photo, and add white borders on the left and right for the vertical frame to control the presentation of the photos on the streaming media as she wishes.

In traditional art, under the superposition of countless brushstrokes, the paint can arch and fall along the force to form tactile lines; or the tan acrylic that is difficult to cover and mispainted, gradually mixed with bright red and off-white. Turn the latter into a low-saturated ash. It is difficult, but not impossible, to speculate on the original form of a painting. What about the photographed images? The processing of film may be possible, but how many layers of "real" a digital photo has been smeared is invisible.

Faced with photos now, we can no longer determine its body, its origin, and the number of its coatings. The only thing that alerts the senses is intuition, an unreality that looms in the mind:

Is what I see real.

"Who told you that?"

Kafka tilted his head to his shoulders.

"Photography focuses your eye on what's on the surface. So it obscures the hidden life that shimmers through the contours of things like the movement of light and shadow. You can't capture even the most sensitive lens. To get to it. You have to feel it to grasp it... This automatic camera doesn't add to the human eye, it just provides a strangely simplified fly's vision."

--Gustav Janauch, "Kafka's Conversations"