Oldal 16 [16]
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Dagnostaw Demski in cooperation with A. Kassabova, I. Sz. Kristöf, L.Laineste and K. Baraniecka-Olszewska
reception: the beliefin and the use of the representation in question. Because of these
tensions and particularities, the authors of the articles in this volume attempt to ad¬
dress all the aspects of visual communication: the encoding of messages, the message
itself (in its content and material form), and the reception and interpretation of it.
Based on our findings we suggest that apart from the particular uses—for the
aims of propaganda, entertainment, and so forth also the general use of visual data
changed during the focal period. The representations not only concerned creat¬
ing a certain imagery and belief about the phenomena of the surrounding world
not experienced directly but they constituted/could be regarded as a manner of
handling reality. We can observe a certain shift roughly after WWII—a process of
moving from “belief in” to a “reality of” the representations—namely to the func¬
tion of documenting reality. This process enables us to understand the specificity of
the media’s function at that time. Materiality is also an important level of analysis
related to a particular medium. Elizabeth Edwards emphasized this aspect relative
to photography and its uses (Edwards & Hart 2004). Although this aspect was not
developed further by the authors of these chapters, it does not deny the relevance of
this level of analysis. The tools of the new media for describing the changing world
shaped the imagery in general and resulted in the previous images being newly
formed. Furthermore, these media changed their (political and social) context and
constructed new Others.
During the period of the 1940s to the 1970s, the number of media and their
influence were continually expanding. New media—film technology and televi¬
sion—developed and started to occupy peoples everyday lives. A history of visual
media shows that early on images took the form of drawings, paintings, sculptures,
caricatures, and posters and then expanded through photography, press, cinema,
television. Images were experienced rarely, at first; later they were more often pub¬
lished in newspapers, journals, leaflets, and posters, and still later became an eve¬
ryday consumption in the form of the television. Initially, broadcasting took only
a few hours in the evening and on one channel only; later it expanded to all day
programming on multiple channels. Television replaced other sources of informa¬
tion, offering the public more and more news from the world. This fact has lead us
to the pivotal question of what creates the experienced reality and how. How was
the everyday human experience shaped? What was the role of the visual media in
it? In order to find answers to these questions, we have to look at the characteristics
of the particular kinds of visual media.
The Variety of Visual Media
Although visual representations are not exact reflections of the surrounding real¬
. . a: » . . .
ity, they constitute a certain “window”, perceived metaphorically, through which
people can watch the ongoing events and their reflections. As we mentioned above,
in drawings and photographs the image is frozen, while in a movie we can be “stare
through a window directly at past events, to experience people and places as if we