Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan

Author:Marshall McLuhan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: English language—Canada
ISBN: 9781584235125
Publisher: Gingko Press
Published: 2013-01-24T16:00:00+00:00

A photograph of “St. Peter’s at a Moment of History” was the cover feature of Life magazine for June 14, 1963. It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photo that it isolates single moments in time. The TV camera does not. The continuous scanning action of the TV camera provides, not the isolated moment or aspect, but the contour, the iconic profile and the transparency. Egyptian art, like primitive sculpture today, provided the significant outline that had nothing to do with a moment in time. Sculpture tends toward the timeless.

Awareness of the transforming power of the photo is often embodied in popular stories like the one about the admiring friend who said, “My, that’s a fine child you have there!” Mother: “Oh, that’s nothing. You should see his photograph.” The power of the camera to be everywhere and to interrelate things is well indicated in the Vogue magazine boast (March 15, 1953): “A woman now, and without having to leave the country, can have the best of five (or more) nations hanging in her closet—beautiful and compatible as a statesman’s dream.” That is why, in the photographic age, fashions have come to be like the collage style in painting.

A century ago the British craze for the monocle gave to the wearer the power of the camera to fix people in a superior stare, as if they were objects. Erich von Stroheim did a great job with the monocle in creating the haughty Prussian officer. Both monocle and camera tend to turn people into things, and the photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise. The movie stars and matinee idols are put in the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy. They can be bought and hugged and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes. Mass-produced merchandise has always made some people uneasy in its prostitute aspect. Jean Genet’s The Balcony is a play on this theme of society as a brothel environed by violence and horror. The avid desire of mankind to prostitute itself stands up against the chaos of revolution. The brothel remains firm and permanent amidst the most furious changes. In a word, photography has inspired Genet with the theme of the world since photography as a Brothel-without-Walls.

Nobody can commit photography alone. It is possible to have at least the illusion of reading and writing in isolation, but photography does not foster such attitudes. If there is any sense in deploring the growth of corporate and collective art forms such as the film and the press, it is surely in relation to the previous individualist technologies that these new forms corrode. Yet if there had been no prints or woodcuts and engravings, there would never have come the photograph. For centuries, the woodcut and the engraving had delineated the world by an arrangement of lines and points that had syntax of a very elaborate kind. Many historians of this visual syntax, like E. H. Gombrich and William M.

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