Oldal 38 [38]
36
Dagnostaw Demski
Practices of Making and Unmaking Difference
The problem of emphasizing difference in visual representations relates to the situ¬
ating of the author (the self) in a specific social field, a way of locating both the nar¬
rator within his or her group and that group’s relationship to other groups, the rep¬
ertoire of motifs and significant themes. Each of them emerges in a specific context
and, depending on the situation, either presents hostility or, at other times, illus¬
trates uncertainty or insecurity. The relationships and motifs may also be represent¬
ed through images or, more broadly, through visual material, each in its own way.
Photography documents the world while remaining a testament to the past, even
though constructed. Itis also a mark or vestige of how the author perceives the world.
Photographs may be treated as aspects of local or supralocal connections. Visual
material creates a field in which individual images and motifs appear. Circulation
of images and discourse is enabled or even facilitated by the media. How do we
understand media? According to Kramer, in the act of conveying something, media
are also capable of drawing attention away from their own materiality and tech¬
nicality’® to redirect attention to what is being mediated. This capacity of media
to at least momentarily stand back and withdraw from perception seems to be the
very condition of their functioning and is indeed central to the definition of what
constitutes a medium (Kramer 2008).
I understand media as what stands between and separates reality from the au¬
thor, or the recipient. On the one hand there are traditional media in the sense of
printed press, drawings, posters, photographs, and, later on, film and television.
Media might also be understood more broadly as word, picture, or sound mediatiz¬
ing the reception of what is real. They constitute a type of convention whose range
of exchange maps out the boundaries of a group that understands the message, the
jokes—that has the same associations with regard to given images. The key to an
appropriate and significant representation is a vanishing mediator. Do the various
media achieve this aim and in what manner?
The medium, participation of the human factor, and metaphors representing
the types of such mediations uncover the basic elements that constitute the re¬
search field and the analysis criteria for the practices used in a given time period.
Possibly, they will allow us to determine whose version of reality they present.
Dorota Sajewska concludes that a confrontation with the reality of war—with
its unprecedented brutality, dehumanization, and bodily and psychological humili¬
ation—also created the very first mediatization of such a scale in history. According
to Susan Sontag, this era started in 1914 (2010: 34). Thanks to the media, those
events and, for some, experiences, gained a new dimension—a second-hand ac¬
count that was slowly developing, taking increasingly more space in people’s every¬
day life and consciousness.
‘© Contemporary media use at least two models mentioned by Van Post (2011), and one of them specifi¬
cally stresses materiality and technicality. However, in the context of analysis of the media from the period
1945-1970, we should focus on one model only.