the fascism of a too democratic photography ?

A very thought provoking essay on how the digital, more democratic,  world of mass photography is  changing the medium as we knew it.   Or want to know it. 

Is the  inundation  of of the world by  images,  enabled by the  an easier, gatekeeper free, distribution system, really creating   a  fascist future?? 

 I have my doubts. But then I am all for a chowkidar free culture. One free of powerful Gatekeepers. 

Much has been written about the moral, ethical, and political dimensions of these photographs, about whether United States military policies condoned and encouraged the abuses, about whether the word torture appropriately describes what they depict, about how young Americans thrown into a situation for which they were ill trained and ill prepared could so quickly succumb to depravity. When select members of Congress were shown some 2,000 of the pictures and video clips in mid-May of last year, they quickly concluded that what they saw was too disgusting to be shown to anyone else. The pictures have since been quarantined as potential legal evidence.

Without forgetting or discounting the importance of these debates, which our nation surely needs to have, I want to focus on the unprecedented manner in which these photographs were taken, transmitted, and received. What they suggest about the future of photography as news and about the nature of information as a cultural commodity is both tantalizing and disturbing.

As both Sontag and Wallis note, the Abu Ghraib pictures represent a violation of the prevailing norms of photojournalism. But the violation is not merely a matter of semiotics or tone. The essential violation is that the pictures were not subject to the constraints of the military-media alliance. Lodged in hard drives and e-mails, and later uploaded onto the Internet, the digital images escaped the control of both the Pentagon and the professional picture-making establishment. These photographs tell us that the codes of objectivity, professional ethics, and journalistic accountability we have long relied on to ensure the accuracy of the news–at least in rough-draft form–are now relics. In their place is a swirling mass of information, written as well as visual, journalistic as well as vernacular, competing to be taken as fact.

Photography is said to have become democratic at the end of the nineteenth century, when George Eastman loosed the Kodak camera on the world. (“You press the button, we do the rest,” was his advertising slogan.) No longer the province of professionals trained in arduous darkroom work, or of amateurs whose interests lay in art, taking photographs became possible for great numbers of middle- and working-class people. With the Kodak, nearly everyone could have a camera, and everyone could have an album of photographs of family and friends. But individual photographs were discrete, tangible objects. To achieve widespread currency they had to be published, and to be published they had to conform to the desires and norms of the media.

The means of transmission of today’s digital images is seamless and profligate by comparison. More than a few “bloggers”–Web diarists–take pictures during the day and upload them onto their Web sites at night. With the rise of cell phones that include digital camera functions, a trip home is no longer even necessary: you can send the pictures off into the electronic network instantaneously. No one controls what pictures can and cannot appear on these sites, or on those devoted to pornography, sadism, and similar unsavory subjects. No one can control them, so the flow of visual information goes unchecked. Beheadings are broadcast on streaming video; collages of uncertain authorship show presidential candidates buddying up to bad guys. More and more Web sites with more and more pictures means a vast new democracy of the image, but one that is so free it becomes chaotic and incomprehensible. With no valve to stem the flow, the flood of images threatens to become not only out of control but also beyond control.

In the case of the Abu Ghraib pictures, the free flow of information made possible by digital cameras and computers helped expose a tawdry chapter in the history of the American military. But there are downsides to the potential that images, and cameras, can now be anywhere and everywhere. Perhaps the most obvious one is surveillance: municipalities have not only installed cameras at intersections to ticket red-light runners retroactively, but, in locations where terrorism is a threat, like Washington, D.C., they have installed video devices that constantly scan the streets and sidewalks. It is not clear whether these cameras are effective as instruments of social control or whether a total information environment enhances the possibility of totalitarian government.

11:01 p.m., Nov. 4, 2003. Detainee with bag over head, standing on box with wires attached.

The norms of reportage still require that photojournalists refrain from tampering with their pictures, as several recently fired news photographers can attest. But the worry over media manipulation of photographs pales beside the threat that we will be exposed to an unedited, unvetted picture world where all images seem equally important and equally trivial. There is no way we will want to look at all of them.

Such a world is perhaps a variant of Jean Baudrillard’s famous formulation of the simulacrum, in which images refer only to other images and not to things as they really are. But merely declaring that we live in an image world does not make explicit the dire consequences of being unable to sort one image from another. Instead of offering us freedom, the uncontrolled flow of pictures distracts us from the task of determining for ourselves what might be real enough to really matter. We face the prospect of being reduced to the status of consumers who, given a hyper-abundance of choices, lack the ability to choose. Those in power benefit from this abandonment of discernment; they get to make the choices for us. Thus the liberty of an unchecked image environment may prove to be less a blessing than a subtle form of tyranny, and the democracy of the camera a perverse kind of fascism.

http://www.americansuburbx.com/2011/04/theory-point-and-shoot-how-abu-ghraib.html