The ubiquity of the image

Joan’s comment seems to me to be essential. The obliteration of a clear distinction between the producers and the consumers of images changes the whole deal. What characterizes the present situation is not only globalization, with the increasing prevalence and uniformity of images, but a new equilibrium, which for the moment, it must be said, is fairly unstable… With the new technologies, the fall in the price of digital cameras and the proliferation of cell phones, anyone can make images. With the appearance of sites like Flikr, which has been enriched with 3,739 images in the last minute, or YouTube, everyone can distribute images on a global scale. The ubiquity of the image is matched by the ubiquity of the makers of images. The system no longer has a monopoly!

But for the time being it is confusion that reigns. Disoriented by an evolution that has gone far too fast, many professionals are now manifesting defensively corporatist reflexes and seeking to bolt the doors on a market that is beyond their control. Disconcerted, some of the schools that train professional image-makers have been known to take refuge in a retrograde technicism. Completely at sea, public education is unable to adapt to a civilization of the image and is the prisoner of a system than for all practical purposes is structured on the text. As consumers, students find themselves immersed in a flood of images that they often take at face value because they are unable to decode them, and as producers they are equipped with the tools of which they have at best arrived at a certain technical mastery, but no real reflection on content. Everybody seems to have forgotten the famous sentence of Moholy-Nagy who said that “the illiterate of the future will be person ignorant of the use of the camera”. Let’s replace the word ‘camera’ with the more general term ‘image’ and pass on the message to the educational decision-makers!