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OCR
16 Dagnostaw Demski in cooperation with A. Kassabova, I. Sz. Kristöf, L.Laineste and K. Baraniecka-Olszewska about how everyday life was influenced by transmission in media and, moreover, by developed and multiplied ways of creating and shaping those transmissions. As Mirzoeff (2016: 10) suggested, the starting point of a message is in fact not a technological phenomenon but the link between social practices using new technologies with changes in the social and cultural world. Photography and Photographic Effect “Photography is a first new medium which introduces passage from meaning to senses” (Kemp 2014: 19); its perception seems to be more sensual and direct. All discussed media—photography, cinema, film, and television—end with representation of impersonal processes, which often are a way of describing reality. They all have one and the same goal: to embrace the world not only in words but in images and words and, thus, offer a chance to touch what was happening and what is reported now. The image makes it possible to “see” the world in the meaning suggested by Nicholas Mirzoeff (2016); that is, images give ways of understanding the world, and the images themselves are an integral part of reality and, even, one of its main components. The history of photography is long and has expanded in different directions, turns and switches. It is difficult to generalize since both the presentations and interpretations of approaches to photography—for example, reporting from the early 1920s in daily newspapers, and in utilitarian and artistic photography—were of great variety and complexity. However, as Kemp writes after WWII, photography was already treated as a particular language (Kemp 2014: 95). To compare with other new media, note that the photography in the time of WWIT was doomed to reality; its primary objective of communication was to capture a “piece of reality”, to crop the right frame, to register a fleeting moment most characteristic to the particular time and situation. As Mirzoeff noted, photography is determined by the time during which the light-sensitive medium—film or later digital sensor—is exposed to light. And as soon as the shutter closes, the moment becomes past tense (Mirzoeff 2016: 38). Examples of such moments we see in the chapters of Demski; Libera & Sztandara; Vaseva; Czarnecka; Lorke; Seljamaa; Baraniecka-Olszewska. Kemp says that the year 1972, in which the fallen American magazine Life, was a new opening in the history of photography (2014: 118). Until this period, photography was recognized as a cultural resource. The accuracy of the description of the event depended on the choice of a set of concepts that were transforming events into facts of a particular kind. After that, photography became more like an object of art. It was not treated as mostly an information container. Our strong belief is also that photography is much more than information; however, we propose that Steichen’s words—that “the task of the photographer is to explain to people who the human being is and to assist him or her in selfknowledge” (quoted by Kemp 2014: 117)—can be, however, equally well applied
