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Dagnostaw Demski
The faith in the transparent, documentary character of photography had become
shaken in the 1920s. Television images of the Vietnam War restored this faith for
some time. The examples provided here confirm the existence of the author, in
the sense of the one who frames the message and the recipient, the given forms
of mediatization; but also they show a different type of circulation of images and
discourse (the press, commemorative albums, television viewers).
‘The examples presented above are solely photographic, but what differentiates
them is the intention and the recipient. In this context we can say that all innova¬
tions are always a product of a certain specific environment, place, and time, and
they reach us already loaded with myths and representations. The albums presented
to party secretaries, the photographs of general Swierczewski, the contemporary
illustrated weeklies such as Przekrdj and press accounts of the Vietnam War were
also products of their times and places; they were created in a specific environment;
offering information, they provide constructed knowledge on the subject of the
values of the social groups within which they function.
Medial Images as a New Way of Experiencing Reality
The aim of this chapter is to present the changes that took place in the manner
of presenting difference in the Polish media in the period between the 1940s and
the 1960s. It is possible to observe two separate motifs—the use of the criterion of
difference in the context of creating a community and the emergence of a new me¬
dial reality. Emphasising the difference gained significance in the period when the
community was becoming important, since the existence of a community provides
an opportunity for impact (Goban-Klas 2009: 75), and reinforcement of a com¬
munity was accompanied by a strong position of the media, with the dominant
roles of communicator, sender, information, and message creator.
On the basis of the material described here, it is possible to state that the cat¬
egory of difference organizes the picture of reality in accordance with the rules of
evaluation and judgment of the authors, who realize their own specific goals. And
the medium refers both to the term describing technological media and to their
functions—that is, to the method of recording and storing data. In each case they
have similar aims, related to the transmission of a certain type of data. Sports pa¬
rades, solemn oaths, celebrations, rituals that resemble those through which new
territories are incorporated, defence of a new order, revival of peaceful everyday life,
interest in the outside world—these relations do not exist simply by themselves,
they are created as a result of configuration and transmission of individual ele¬
ments and media. The relations between content and new media, gaining increased
significance with the passage of time, lead to the continuous creation of different
forms of representation. One gets the impression that in the period under discus¬
sion there occurred a slow transition from a more sensory and personal perception
of the world (by people having some reference to the war they experienced directly)
towards experiencing the reality through the images produced by the media (e.g. of