To understand what I am going to write about here, it will help if you have read The Spectacle of the Real. Take your time. I’ll wait. I want to interact with you here. I think it is important.
This is going to be a different experience in writing and posting.
I’m going to write, then post, write some more, post, and do this until I feel like I have said what needs to be said on the 10th anniversary of the publishing of The Spectacle of the Real.
I’m going to publish a series of short pieces . When done, I’ll combine them into one long essay. I’ll do this because I want one intact post to represent my reflections here. I welcome questions and comments along the way that will help me to be clearer.
Part 1: The Power of Images
The Spectacle of the Real was a moment in time when my level of perception, intellectual coherence, and articulation of my thoughts coalesced in a way as never before. Please understand that I am not boasting. It is rather the recognition that the observations and patterns of behavior that I had been tracking since my college days were leading somewhere.
In the fall of 1974, I took a seminar course required for my American Studies degree called Identity and Consciousness in the Modern World. There were three students and our professor. He never described course requirements. All we knew was that we had to present a project at the end of the course. I decided to do a photographic essay on the epigram “A picture is worth a thousand words.” My project focused on the difference between advertising billboards on highways verses in cities. The thesis statement was “If a picture is worth a thousand words, at highway speeds, is one word worth one word?” Over Thanksgiving break, a few us left Chapel Hill and drove to Boston to spend Thanksgiving with friends who were in grad school there. I took pictures up and back. On the Interstate, billboards would read, “Gas, Next Exit.” In town, there would be a picture like this one.
The important thing to understand is that no one read the word Marlboro. It was an image pair with the rugged individualism of the American cowboy. Image transcends content. Or as Marshall McLuhan wrote, “the medium is the message.”
Fifty years ago, I was already thinking about images and how they communicate. I took art history classes. I’d visit art galleries with friends. I’d buy books that were collections of paintings. I watched a lot of television and went to the movies.
I found the painters like Frederick Church, Albert Bierstadt, and Charlie Russell, who romanticized the time and place of the Western United States in the 19th. Century appealing.
I had a Bierstadt print like this one hanging on my college dorm room wall. Two years after graduation, I found myself with two friends crossing the Tokotee Pass into Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where forty years later, I moved, I found the reality met the romance.
At that point, I did not realize that there was a spectrum of reality to images. At one end of the spectrum, artists romanticize time and nature to elevate its beauty. On the other end is the anti-romance of AI technology.
Capturing Pictures
Even before I began to take pictures, images caught my eye. The most significant happened on the Sunday after President John F. Kennedy had been shot and killed in Dallas. It was the fall of 1963, a couple of months after moving into our family’s new home. There were three national broadcast companies and one public education channel. No cable. No live stream. Just television programming received with an antenna on the top of our house. We were watching the coverage of the assassination as Lee Harvey Oswald, the man charged with killing the president, was being transferred to another location. Out of the right side of the screen, a man rushes toward Oswald and shoots him. It was all live on our television.
This image is close to what we saw. I was ten years old at the time. I had never seen a person shot, much less a dead man. It happening live on TV.
Images to me were more than something to look at. They were something to create. In high school, I purchased my first single-lens-reflex camera. I spent a lot of money on slide film. It was a time long before digital was created. Each picture was framed in the eyepiece. There were only so many pictures on a roll of film. I’d put the rolls in a mailer and ship them off to Seattle Filmworks to be processed. A week later, I get them back. Twelve years later, I was taking pictures in Pakistan, chronicling a journey that became the starting point for The Spectacle of the Real.
The appeal of the visual image, I believe, is because my memories are largely visual. I have a vivid picture of my fifth-grade classroom when Principal Hardy told us over the Public Address System that the president had been shot. This direct experience is far more memorable than the pictures that I saw on the television later that afternoon. Is it because the medium of the virtual is the reverse of the real? It is a simulation, a distillation, and a reduction of the scenes. This is the question that The Spectacle of the Real ultimately began to answer for me.
The image in my mind is my memory. But that image is not a precise representation of reality. I remember sitting on the right side of the classroom, two seats up from the back of the room, the intercom speaker up on the wall to my right. I remember my mother being the substitute teacher that day. I don’t remember what she wore or what the bulletin boards on the walls had on them or who sat at the desks around me, or what subject we were covering that afternoon.
The image in our minds, like the image on the screen or on the printed page is not a complete picture. It is partial and selection, maybe even prejudicial. All images are this way.
A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.
— Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity.
So it is with an image. In the essay, I describe the news coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing to illustrate. The reporting was not the story. The story was not the whole story. The images changed the story. And ultimately, the real story was not the story the expert opinion makers said it was.
Every image is an interpretation. It is how we see things. We think of ourselves as objective, unbiased subjects looking at objects that are detached from us. The reality is that our perception of the object changes the object. We see as we wish to see it. It becomes what we choose for it to become. No one escapes the personalization of perception.
To better understand, we will look at the thought of people who have come to be known for their critique of the images and perceptions of events.
Thank you Ed. Like you, I am a very visual person.
We were discussing a place we had been to years ago on a family holiday, and what came back to me was pictures - sitting in a cosy cafe having breakfast, being on a walk trying to find Golden Eagles, etc. Very subjective, snapshots of the real place.
It is fascinating how our brain will process things.
Thanks for sharing this, Ed - the role of images in our culture and how we perceive and live in the world is a rich vein to mine. It's interesting to me that you are, like me, an admirer of Iain McGilchrist but wrote your essay on spectacle in 2013 presumably before having read his work. If anything he probably represents an advance on Baudrillard in understanding the virtual world that we've created and then persuaded ourselves is the real one.