Note: If you see this text you use a browser which does not support usual Web-standards. Therefore the design of Media Art Net will not display correctly. Contents are nevertheless provided. For greatest possible comfort and full functionality you should use one of the recommended browsers.

Themesicon: navigation pathPhoto/Byteicon: navigation pathPhotographic/Post-Photographic
 
The Pencil of Nature (Talbot, Henry Fox), 1844
 
 
 

icon: previous page

authenticated at the same (‹It actually happened›). Shutter photography, as analyzed by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in the 1960s, became primarily an agent of the cohesion of the family, for which it both produced verification and at the same time created. [33] For this reason, the new practices of shutter photography that arose in the course of digitalization are to be viewed in connection with the dissolution of traditional family structures and the forms of relationships and communication that take their place. [34]

The photograph in the media environment

The history of photographic intermediality—the connection of photo/book, text/image—began with the publication of Talbot's book «The Pencil of Nature.» [35] However, prior to the 1880s this connection was associated with a small number of copies, as photographs were either glued into books or produced using printing processes that required a high degree of craftsmanship. For the mass circulation of illustrated magazines and newspapers, photographs first had to be transferred onto wood engravings— with the arrival in

 

the 1880s of the screening process of autotypy, they could then be transferred mechanically to a printing plate and printed together with the copy. In the course of the illustrated magazine boom in the first half of the twentieth century, the photo report and the documentary photo essay emerged as specific forms of the combination of photo series with text contributions. The success of the mass press in the 1920s was also accompanied by criticism thereof: Siegfried Kracauer, for instance, implored the danger of substituting the experience of reality with the world of media. In his words: «The public sees the world in magazines, and magazines prevent perception of the world.» [36] This criticism would later be formulated in a whole range of variations. [37] In the media environment of the illustrated press, photographs are assigned meaning through captions and text contributions; text contributions are verified through photos: This intermedial configuration is decisive for the reception of photographic images. The switchover from offset printing to computer-based desktop publishing required the conversion of the photographic image into digital data—digitalization thus represents a

icon: next page