Bildfähig!

1

The flickr group Cars, cars, cars has the astounding number of 4.865 members with over 80.000 pictures posted. Another group responsive to anybody’s passionate interest in shoes (i love shoes) still has 1.211 members and 3.803 photographs. flickr groups of this kind collect pictures showing but one specific object which is in many cases a consumer good (the screenshot above shows a similar group for sneakers). They are visual archives of contemporary material culture; as such they belong to the most interesting visual phenomena on sites like flickr.

Grant McCracken has written that without „consumer goods, modern, developed societies would lose key instruments for the reproduction, representation, and manipulation of their culture.“ (p. xi) All entries of this blog are based on a second assumption: we believe that the same is true for both static and moving technological images. Combining McCracken’s assumption and ours, we get to the crucial question concerning this kind of images: how should we define the relationship between the objects themselves and the images that picture them.

We will find elements of an answer in two essays written by Heinrich Wölfflin at the end of the 19th century which deal with the problem how one should photograph a sculpture. Wölfflin observes that different points of views result in different reproductions which each present their subjet in entirely different ways. Major parts of his essays describe these differences. Still, his concluding argument is in all cases identical: those reproductions are false and disadvantageous which ignore the point of view for which the artist has conceived the sculpture.

Obviously, this conclusion is the part of Wölfflin’s arguments to be rejected. There is no reason why a reproduction should always be consistent with the maker’s initial conception of a sculpture. Applied to consumer goods with which we are dealing in here, such a demand would be even absurd, if not impossible to follow. But still Wölfflin’s essays are useful: if we ignore his strong hierarchy of right and false reproductions and rather concentrate on his observations concerning differences between reproductions, we find ourselves much more attentive to how reproductions shape our expectations and perceptions of sculptures or any other kind of three-dimensional objects.

This leads us to the core problem of the images on flickr to be discussed here, even though we will find what Wölfflin analyzes in a far more complicated fashion on flickr. Obviously, these reproductions of consumer goods differ not just in their points of view on the object: they are the result of all kinds of photographic techniques leading to different visual presentation of an object. However, a second difference is of far greater importance: Wölfflin’s analysis deals with a specific historical object that was reproduced in a number of different ways but with no influence on anyone making a new sculpture. In case of industrially made products which are constantly redesigned, reproductions have by contrast a real if not immediate impact on the design of any new generation of products. This is because their appearance in an image has strong effects on what we expect from a product and therefore necessarily also on its sucess. Still this hasn’t been such a complex issue, when products were mostly reproduced in advertising photographs made by using professional technical tools to create a convincing reproduction of a product.  And this picture was in most, if not all cases the only one available in the public sphere.

With the enormous accumulation of pictures on flickr and a growing audience of users interested in posting pictures of consumer goods as well as looking at this kind of pictures, this will change. People will start to manipulate actively the expectations for a product by making reproductions in a way they find interesting or true and no longer depend solely on the advertising image of a product. One can expect that in the future any object that is less suited by its design to appear in a convincing manner in pictures made by non-professional photographers will need at least partial improvement. The fact that its reproductions available on sites like flickr will attract lesser interest from its reproductions than others, may have significant consequences for the success of a product. It should make some kind of difference if there are 5 million car pictures available in a public picture medium.

Bildquelle: screenshot flickr (detail), Oct. 31, 2008: “Sneaker Pimps”

References:

McCracken, Grant. Culture & Consumption. New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988, here.

Wölfflin, Heinrich. “Wie man Skulpturen aufnehmen soll.” In: Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst, Part 1, Nr. 7, 1896, pp. 224-228, Part 2: Nr. 8, 1897, S. 294-297.

More English posts: here.