Research Report: The Power of Images

By Valerie Liu, Harrison Bergeron Team 

Item

Srivatsan, R. "Photography and Society: Icon Building in Action." Economic and Political

Weekly 26.11 (Mar. 1991): 771-773. 11 Feb. 2009 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/4397434>

Abstract

     R. Srivatsan’s article, “Photography and Society: Icon Building in Action,” is an analytic article that looks at the various forms of photography, such as film, and their roles in the media as a medium of truth and builders of our everyday conceptions and standards of things.  Srivatsan argues that the power of icon-building has been bestowed on photography due to the visual medium’s extreme accessibility and “obligation” to reporting the truth.

Description

     The article poses the question, “how does photography work” (p. 771) and argues that because the idea of truth is so closely linked to photographic vision, the audience has become viewers and absorbers of the images and ideas that are produced and dispersed throughout the media. Photographic vision, which is present from newspapers, advertisements, television, and cinema, “to name only the most obvious communication media,” (p. 771) is evidently everywhere, whether stationary or attended by add-ons like music or movement. Images have infiltrated practically everything in all places, so that it is necessary to scrutinize simple notions and beliefs and examining how much of those ideas have been influenced by the visuals and the visuals’ messages placed around everybody.

    Srivatsan states that photographic vision has the ability to penetrate any form of communication and “reconstituting its logic and practice” (p. 771). This not only shows how prevalent photographic vision is, but how powerful it is, since it can alter the path of logic and performance in human minds and perceptions. The article uses the example of television’s role in changing and further validating the impact and influence of broadcast news. Broadcast news, in its earliest forms, were simply voices bringing current information through things like radio. On the other hand, televised broadcast news, which adds the very important addition of the projection of images to the words, further convinces and asserts the information being related to the viewer, since the viewer now has a more realistic, concrete view of the reported news. With the idea of “seeing is believing,” television’s way of repeatedly exposing the viewer to the scene, whether the scene is of a violent beating or a scene of extremely impoverished children, ingrains the events by relying on the truth factor of these events to convey our ideas of things like “reality, beauty, and utopia” (p. 773). The viewer easily subscribes to these notions because of the legitimacy that is “guaranteed by the ethics of television news” (p. 771). The article explains that because the expectation that what is seen must be real, information and conceptions accompanied by images must also be real.

    The article first delves into the history of the images (photography), and that since its conception, has been seen as a medium that is committed to the nature of the depicted subject and is reliable in portraying the subject as it is in reality. Initially, photographic images were developed singularly and not widely available to the masses because of the difficulty of the chemical processes involved, but now, it is obvious that images can be widely reproduced and seen by the public. According to Srivatsan, images now function as objects of “reverence, models for emulation… in other words, they function as icons” (p. 772). The idea of images functioning as icons elevates them to the status of conveyors and leaders of widely-available and thoughts and ideas not only accepted, but adopted, by almost everyone. Srivatsan explains how the easy accessibility and circulation of images in the media allow the thoughts circumscribed to the images to easily penetrate the societal structure and “communicate many different messages in diverse dimensions” (p. 772).  Photography becomes a medium of “evidence, posing as copies of a real scene which was ‘snapped up’” (p. 772) and recorded for audiences to look back to and support and reaffirm certain information and ideas.

    Srivatsan explains that photography has been able to act as a speaker of truth because of the generally “tacit acceptance of photography as a truthful medium” (p. 772). The trust everyone places on their vision as a way to reaffirm ideas and chase away doubts has assigned photography with the assumption that it will faithfully “reproduce real objects” (p. 772) which then sets off a “train of thought processes” (p. 772), like formation of beliefs and desires. There is a constant interplay between the “reality” of photographs and how the reality then transcribes itself into ideas and desires channeled into the viewer. An example the article uses is an advertisement for a water filter, which depicts an image of a beautiful mother feeding and holding a healthy-looking child. The article explains how the advertisement not only works to persuade the viewer and consumer that the filter works to provide clean, nourishing water, but also that a family should be “small, wealthy (enough to afford the product), happy, beautiful” (p. 772). Through the simple, seemingly normal image, the viewer is channeled with the desire to have the water filter because it seems somehow linked with the idea of a health, beauty, and an ideal family atmosphere.

    The article explains how images are used to trigger multiple ideas based on the truth factor viewers have subscribed to images. The objective veracity assigned and assumed from photographs allows images to place ideas, thoughts, and desires into the viewer – thoughts that subsequently shape mass opinions and beliefs on various issues.

Commentary

    The article functions as a supplement to the main medium in which we will approach and analyze the satirical text, “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut. Finding the short story’s themes to be about equality, especially the downfalls and absurdity of extreme equality, lack of thought, and ideas like Tall Poppy Syndrome, we decided that it would be interesting to recreate the development of how America would achieve such an absurdly extreme state of equality and utopia (that is, as an “unforeseen” result, dystopia). To recreate and map out the “progress” of the total equality, we envisioned a type of “equality revolution,” which relied on visualizations like documentaries, photographs, teaching videos, and blogs to throw the message to the masses.

    Srivatsan’s article, which discusses photography, or images in general, as a mode to easily make and shape ideas and thoughts to the public, acts as reaffirming support and explanation of our choice for using the visual medium as the essence of our project. Because the people in the story are either thoughtless or rendered thoughtless by ways of handicaps, the best way to explain how America was conditioned into such a state is through methods of brainwashing propaganda and repeated exposure to the new enforcement of utter equality. The article explains how images are able to breed ideas and shape our conceptions and desires, and with videos and photographs of a campaign for total equality, we can take the impact of images and show how it pertains to ways the government possibly molded Americans into thinking that total equality is the ideal state, and how the desire for an absolutely equal, dumb-downed society was beamed into American minds. The article works to support our decision to approach and analyze the text with visuals. Because the idea of what constitutes an image, be it drawings, snapshot photographs, films, etc., is so broad, little to no limitations are placed on what we choose to depict.

Resources for Further Study

Further studies of assumed-truthfulness of images and the impact the images have in shaping public views, beliefs, and desires can be found in the following links:

Hiley, Nicholas. “Review: The Pictorial Media.” The Historical Journal 31.1 (Mar. 1988): p. 241-247. <http://www.jstor.org  /stable/2639248>

Long, Kathryn T. “Cameras ‘Never Lie’: The Role of Photography in Telling the Story of

American Evangelical Missions.” Chuch History 72.4 (Dec. 2003): p. 820-851. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/4146374>

Melin, William E. "Photography and the Recording Process in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction." Leonardo 19.1 (1986): 53-60. 11 Feb. 2009 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1578302>

Negash, Girma. “Art Invoked: A Mode of Understanding and Shaping the Political.”

International Political Science Review 25.2 (Apr. 2004): p. 185-201. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1601676>

Srivatsan, R. "Photography and Society: Icon Building in Action." Economic and Political

Weekly 26.11 (Mar. 1991): 771-773. 11 Feb. 2009 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/4397434>