Has Television Taken Over Photography?

Has Television Taken Over Photography?In the eon of television and internet streaming videos, photography is no longer as pervasive a tool of social require as it use to be. Its golden age is now over, since it flourished and died along with the great dictatorships of the 20th Century. In fact, the close to eloquent examples of the use of photography as a sum to seduce people and annihilate their ability of a critical abbreviation of reality (in ordering to submit their will to the goals of a governing elite) wad be found in the period between the 1920s and the 1950s. It was in such period that the fascist, nazi, and communist propaganda saw in photographers the perfect craftsmen who could convert images, often fake or posed, into messages to convey a erupticular entropy about what was going on in their country. In Italy, it was through the take tos taken by anonymous photographers that Benito Mussolini partaged to give the people the idea of being part of a great nation , where everybody (intellectuals, sportsmen, the Church, the unions, the common men) were proud to demonstrate their faith in the fascist regime1. It was through them that he was able to pass the country as a plentiful land, led by a approximate-hearted man embodying the virtues of the great Roman emperors. Most of those photographers were on the job(p) for the uni manikin institution, the Istituto Luce, a offici al wizardy independent organism that was actually controlled by the fascist regime. Its purpose was to lock away as a modern password agency, besides any proof of the disastrous economic and social conditions of many aras of Italy (such as Sicily, Veneto or Sardinia) was withdrew from the press. So, in that respect were no news, if they had to be bad news. Another example of Mussolinis search at distorting reality was the photographic book Italia imperiale (Imperial Italy), published in 1937. The author, Manilo Morgagni, wrote a visual elegy of the virtues of th e dictator.In the same period, Adolf Hitler was making a confusable use of photography in Germany, especially thanks to the collaboration of Leni Riefenstahl, who ulterior would become one of the most famous artists of the world. The book Schoenheit im Olympischen Kampf (Beauty in the exceeding games), published in 1938, was a collection of her shots of the German youth, taken during the Olympic Games held in Berlin in 1936 it was an instrument of Hitlers propaganda aimed at celebrating the perfect sensible marks that only the pure Aryan race could boast2. In this way, German universe was given an amount of visual messages that confirmed the superiority of their race, so that thither was no questioning about the crimes their leader was committing in foreign countries. On the other hand, Hitler wie ihn keiner kennt (The unknown Hitler) was an homage to the Furher from his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, and was completely dedicated to him and his cliquish life. It sh owed a leader caressing children and enjoying mountain resorts, depicting him as founding father and protector on the nation.In the USSR, Iosif Stalin reduced the avant-garde photographer Aleksandr Rodchenko to a mere instrument to convey the perfection of a state working in the best imaginable way, where every movement was preordained and nothing could go wrong. In fact, the usual subjects of Rodchenko were military parades and in the public eye(predicate) meetings, during which everybody had a specific character to play and a proper place to fit in3. Moreover, Stalin made a wide use of photomontage to insert his figure in all the military issue moments of the October Revolution of 1917, so that the people were induced to think that it was him who actively participated and fought in the process that led to the creation of a land that was supposedly governed by them. Another famous example of the way photography and its manipulation were apply to attain the consent of the peopl e is the picture taken by Yevgeny Khaldei in Berlin on May 2nd, 1945. It is the image of a soldier of the Red multitude raising the communist flag on the roof of the Reichstag4. Since Khaldei arrived too late, when the transaction had already been accomplished, he asked a soldier to repeat it in order to fix the moment on film, and give Russian population another(prenominal) proof of the power of their leader.Further east, Mao Tse-tung was acting in the same way, one of his preferred photographers being Li Zenghshen, who took also many shots of the atrocities attached by the regime simply hid them until the late Nineties, when he thought it was unattackable to show them to the public without risking to be prosecuted by the communist regime.The above mentioned examples are taken from the major dictatorships of the past century nonetheless in the 1930s the greatest democracy of the world, the USA, had a similar approach to photography, although lacking the militaristic vision of t he country that characterised the totalitarian regimes. The American government did not place a wide and evident use of photography to make its citizens tote up on its political and financial behaviour, but in some make documentary images were used as proofs of the necessity of its decisions. The Farm Security Administration, for instance, was founded in 1935 by president Franklin Delano Roosevelt as part of his New Deal broadcast aimed at rescuing the nation after the great depression of 1929. Its goal was to mollify the rural populations from their poverty and many famous photographers (Russell Lee, Jack Delano, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans among the others) were hire to document their situation, in order to inform about it people financial backing in the urban areas. But this project was also meant to provide a visual justification on how and why the government was spending public money, hold backing any questioning by the richest part of the population5. The best output o f this polity was a book compiled by Archibald McLeish, titled Land of the free and published in 1938.In the mean fleck, another way to use photography in order to exert social control was beginning to see the lax in the USA. But this one was completely different from the propaganda experienced in Europe, since it was focused on not showing, rather than on showing. It is the aspect of the 216 thermonuclear tests held by the Army between 1945 and 1962 (in the desert in the state of Nevada or in the middle of the Pacific Ocean). They were documented by anonymous officials in general through aerial photography, but the pictures were kept in secret register till very recently, because the government thought that such experiments might climb doubts in public opinion about nuclear power and the chilly state of war6. This attitude quickly developed and expanded to the majority of the nations, prompting governments to prevent their people from looking at what might endanger their consent. A form of undeclared censorship has been watching over photography all the time, and war reporters have been its principal targets. One of the most recent and outstanding case is the story occurred to a now famous picture taken by Kenneth Jarecke during the first Gulf War (1991). He shot the body of an Iraki soldier, burnt to a cinder by American bombing while he was retreating with his troop on the Basra road7. This picture was published abroad but not in the USA until the war was definitively over, since it might counter the Pentagons notion of a technological a war amended of all the atrocities of the previous ones.Nonetheless, nowadays television has taken over the role that was play by photography, and it has become the principal tool to exert social control. Probably, this function is still accomplished by photography only through commercials, but in this case the aim is altering peoples apprehension of reality in order to influence their needs. The most interesting aspect of this function is that who is sending the message to the public usually does not depict a fake situation as it were real, nor does hide a point side of it. Most commercials evoke a hypertechnological world or a lost one, like in Marlboro Countrys advertisements, where values and life-style are as simple and good as in the good old days8. Two opposite worlds that have just one feature in common they can be reached through the product advertised. This mannequin of social control is very different from that exercised through propaganda and censorship, but it moldiness be noted that its target is not the citizen as a political individual, but the consumer as a participant in the local and globular market. Moreover, there is not such a monopoly of the mass media as the one that is proper of a governing institution, but all the organs emitting messages to control the public are constantly competing against each other to be most visible. Consequently, this particular use of p hotography requires bigger and more accessible platforms wherefore communicate, such as glossy, fancy magazines and huge city billboards.BibliographyMichael Famighetti Underexposed, Aperture 173, winter 2003, pages 14-16.marshal McLuhan Understanding media, Routledge, 2002, chapters 2 and 20.Martin Parr and Gerry Badger The photobook a history. Volume 1, Pahidon, 2004, chapter 6.Ian Jeffrey Photography, Thames and Hudson, 1981, chapter 9.Li Zhensheng Red-color news soldier, Phaidon, 2003.Michael Light 100 Suns, Contrasto Due, 2004.1Footnotes1 con picture 12 See pictures 2 and 33 See picture 44 See picture 55 See picture 6, by Dorothea Lange6 See pictures 7, 8 and 97 See picture 108 See picture 11