— Wim Wenders, A Notebook On Clothes and Cities, 1989 (via Just focus)

This statement is from 1989, before the world-wide-web or the first digital camera (The Kodak DCS100) were created. It’s accurate in some ways, though deceptive — the conversation about the aura of an image, particularly in photography and film, is at the center of Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin discusses at length implications of originality and the diminishing value of an image as it is commodified and consumed en masse. Unlike Wenders, he doesn’t simply denounce reproducibility, he arrives at a transformation of intent — “the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice — politics.”

Both Benjamin and Wenders showed incredible insight into the future, but neither could predict the rate at which the importance of authorship has diminished in the era of “curation” that Tumblr, WeHeartIt, Pinterest, and similar media-sharing communities have cultivated. The sense of identity that is lost with the originality of creation extends from these decades-old ideas about film to the modern era of blogs — the distinction between creator and spectator becomes increasingly blurry as the spectator is now a participant, the origin of an image is inconsequential as the masses of “curators” seek to define themselves by those images they consume, their [perceived] identity has become more important than the actual art (or the artists) from which they have derived it. Again from Benjamin (of film, but perhaps more applicable to blogging in 2011), “Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional… Literary license is now founded on polytechnic rather than specialized training and thus becomes common property.” 

So does this imply pejorative meaning? Has society regressed as creation is no longer a facility of the vanguard, now that anyone can be an author and further that the appreciator of a masterpiece is as important as the creator? Any opinion is likely determined as a result of one’s position as either author or curator… Conventional wisdom considers infinite reproduction as the destruction of value and ritual, the loss of identity and aura, desensitization. Traditionalists romanticise a bygone era where the separation between artist and spectator existed, where the artist was isolated in a class that existed outside of socio-economic bounds… but this need to grasp to an old-world ideology is clearly self-serving.

Futurists and spectators say “fuck it!” with a punk rock disregard for rules or bourgeois ideas of ownership — art in a classless society is for the people. Some of my favorite artists relied heavily on these notions — Andy Warhol as he explored the commodification of art with elevation of universally recognizable items iconic importance and the subversive factory-like reproduction of iconic images until the singular lost all meaning, and Keith Haring who shattered notions of originality with his POP SHOP, where his art was produced and sold for mass-consumption.

Love it or hate it, the depreciating value of originality is not slowing. In 1930, Georges Duhamel wrote of film, “I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images… a pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures who are consumed by their worries…, a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes no intelligence…, which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope other than the ridiculous one of someday becoming a ‘star’ in Los Angeles.” It’s almost as if he were describing a Tumblr dashboard streaming with infinite, seemingly identitical images, a web browser with innumerable tabs perpetually opening and closing to increasingly numb eyes and increasingly thoughtless minds.

But is Wenders talking about the value of photography in the age of digital reproduction or the authority? Is the fear that modern images lack the gravitas of old masterpieces, or that they betray truth as infinitesimal modification becomes easier and easier? Possibly both. It’s true that digital tools allow for a more persuasive level of deceit within a photograph than ever before, but the idea that forgery and alteration are products of technology is supercilious and puerile.

For decades the photograph was viewed as truth, as evidence, but it was never real, it never told the whole story. Magritte challenged the idea of representation with his painting of a pipe that stated explicitly, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (This is not a pipe). The important distinction was made between a physical object and oil paint applied to canvas in an attempt to depict that object. The statement seems obvious, but as the fidelity of the representation becomes greater, the distinction becomes less apparent — this is the case with photography. Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, exploited the trust vested in photographs to create false realities that he presented as truth among his works of photojournalism. He did not alter the surface of the image to fool the spectator, but rather staged a fiction within the frame that was assumed to be real. Digitally manipulating an image is just one way to deceive an audience, even an “original” in Wender’s terms cannot be trusted because reality exists beyond the bounds of the film frame. In terms of time and space, a still photograph lacks context — it can imply that which exists outside of its bounds, what’s directly above or below the crop of the image, what happened an instant before it was captured or what will happen an instant later, and thus it can create a narrative, but to take any image as truth is to disregard that conscious (and sub-conscious… and sometimes devious or self-serving) decisions were made to shape the content of the frame. The photo is not the truth, but rather the truth that the photographer wants the audience to see.

(via absolutist)