Marshall McLuhan writes about photography

gone · Jul 12, 2021

I found a copy of his "Understanding Media" in a Little Free Library today, and his chapter on photography sure makes for some difficult reading. McLuhan doesn't so much present new ideas as hurl them at you. An example of the transformation provided by photos, "My, that's a fine child you have there". Mother: "Oh, that's nothing. You should see his photograph". Or....

"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 machinery".

"Nobody can commit photography alone. It is possible to have the illusion of reading and writing in isolation, but photography does not foster such attitudes".

"Photography mirrored the external world automatically, yielding an exactly repeatable visual image. It was this all important quality of uniformity and repeatability that had made the Gutenberg break between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance."

He also writes of how the Italians marveled at how their Camera Obscura could bring the outside world inside, but were disappointed in viewing an upside down image. This led to the development of lenses to correct the view. However, humans actually see things upside down, and it's our brain which makes the image "right side up" again. Early explorers found that photos they had given to Eskimos were displayed in the igloos upside down as well as right side up. The "untrained mind" had to be told how to look at a photo! This changes deeply held moral, ethical and religious beliefs on what reality actually is, and what exactly is conditioning from birth.

He's trying very hard to get to the very nature of reality, and saying over and over that what we collectively agree to call reality is anything but. The photograph, through carefully crafted visual techniques, can make us believe almost anything, especially if presented by a spokesperson that is trusted. Can a photograph be trusted to represent what actually happened? Or is it always open to interpretation and context? I could see times when what someone saw was not what the camera saw, and vice versa. There's a lot to reread, but I think he's leaning toward calling a photograph a non-biologically made product which none the less holds some manner of living energy properties, those of the image maker, those of the one photographed, and those of the viewer. It's this gumbo of context and events that determines what we see in a photo.

Helge · Jul 12, 2021

Understanding Media is one of the seminal texts of the twentieth century.

McLuhan is more often than not arrogantly appropriated and denigrated by people not worthy to hold a candle to him, who (famously in Anni Hall) “know nothing of his work”.

Many of his famous dictums are not to be understood at face value.

“The medium is the message” and “The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the grand fallacy”, are good examples.
They are mind probes, that will unfold by themselves when processed. And the rest of the book will help you do that.

Even when he get facts wrong it is almost always for the right reasons and with fascinating consequences and connotations. Sometimes he will purposefully lie to the reader and twist truths to get a point through.
That sounds like, and could be a free pass to say any old BS, to the devils advocate. But it’s all part of the contract any writer has with his reader.
There is never a guarantee, and he will only convince you if you let him.
In that sense (too) he is very iterative and recursive.

There can be no doubt that McLuhan would see digital and film photography as two very distinctly different media, despite their superficial similarities.

MurrayMinchin · Jul 13, 2021

Photographs are:

momus said:
...a non-biologically made product which none the less holds some manner of living energy properties, those of the image maker, those of the one photographed, and those of the viewer. It's this gumbo of context and events that determines what we see in a photo.

That was/is awesome!

I'll be writing that one down and posting it in the darkroom.

jtk · Jul 13, 2021

When someone says "there can be no doubt" ...

pentaxuser · Jul 13, 2021

momus said:
However, humans actually see things upside down, and it's our brain which makes the image "right side up" again. Early explorers found that photos they had given to Eskimos were displayed in the igloos upside down as well as right side up. The "untrained mind" had to be told how to look at a photo! This changes deeply held moral, ethical and religious beliefs on what reality actually is, and what exactly is conditioning from birth..

So were these upside down pics those of subjects so unfamiliar to an Eskimo that there was no way he could be expected to know which was the correct way up? So presumably for instance a picture of a sledge, canoe, seal or Polar Bear would all have been hung the correct way up but a bicycle, car might not

Maybe it was never made clear exactly what the reason for this dual method of hanging pics was?

Thanks

pentaxuser

Helge · Jul 13, 2021

pentaxuser said:
So were these upside down pics those of subjects so unfamiliar to an Eskimo that there was no way he could be expected to know which was the correct way up? So presumably for instance a picture of a sledge, canoe, seal or Polar Bear would all have been hung the correct way up but a bicycle, car might not

Maybe it was never made clear exactly what the reason for this dual method of hanging pics was?

Thanks

pentaxuser

No, they where simply not familiar with the concept and conventions of a framed pictorial image. Much less a photo.
He tells a similar story (I believe in Gutenberg Galaxy) about a rainforest Indian tripe that when showed a film, finds it incomprehensible, but they did notice a chicken in one corner of the screen at one point. So that is what the movie was to them.

Alan Edward Klein · Jul 13, 2021

Maybe hanging upside down prevents the essence of the person photographed from being removed by the camera. Some cultures are very sensitive to those things.

MurrayMinchin · Jul 13, 2021

My wife and I went on a six month sea kayak trip on BC's coast. When we got to Port Hardy on Vancouver Island, after taking a month to get there from Bella Bella, we sat on the hotel room floor going through our gear for about 20 minutes before we realized there were chairs to sit on. Our frame of reference had changed.

An upside down or sideways photograph might have been perfectly acceptable for early contact indigenous peoples...such as...an upside down portrait is pretty much the same as looking at someone laying down while you stand behind their head looking down on them, or a landscape sideways may be the same as visualizing a landscape before being introduced to north/south oriented maps.

pentaxuser · Jul 13, 2021

Helge said:
No, they where simply not familiar with the concept and conventions of a framed pictorial image. Much less a photo.

So if I am familiar with an object but have never seen that object in a framed pictorial image, would I fail to recognise it as the same object that I am familiar with, simply because all I now see is a representation of that object? When ancient cave dwellers painted pictures of things they had seen in real life they seem to paint them the right way up so what is it about a photograph ( literally writing with light) that confuses the Eskimo and does the same confusion arise with say an Amazonian tribe that has seen real animals in the jungle if they are given photos of said animals?

Thanks

pentaxuser

Helge · Jul 13, 2021

pentaxuser said:
So if I am familiar with an object but have never seen that object in a framed pictorial image, would I fail to recognise it as the same object that I am familiar with, simply because all I now see is a representation of that object? When ancient cave dwellers painted pictures of things they had seen in real life they seem to paint them the right way up so what is it about a photograph ( literally writing with light) that confuses the Eskimo and does the same confusion arise with say an Amazonian tribe that has seen real animals in the jungle if they are given photos of said animals?

Thanks

pentaxuser

1. Paleolithic people in France and Spain who painted the caves (rarely lived in them) had a much more sophisticated pictorial culture than the Inuit. But even their images didn't have four sides around them, they weren't a slice of time from a perspective point of view, and they where often also sculpted and to a limited degree animated.
So they would also have a difficult time comprehending a photo.
We often forget how much of a mechanised abstraction photography is, because it's practically air to us.
2. Read my first post here. McLuhan might have gilded the lilly/put a point on the story, and so might the people who told it in the first place.
Herodotus had a similar problem two and half thousand years ago.

MurrayMinchin · Jul 13, 2021

pentaxuser said:
So if I am familiar with an object but have never seen that object in a framed pictorial image, would I fail to recognise it as the same object that I am familiar with, simply because all I now see is a representation of that object? When ancient cave dwellers painted pictures of things they had seen in real life they seem to paint them the right way up so what is it about a photograph ( literally writing with light) that confuses the Eskimo and does the same confusion arise with say an Amazonian tribe that has seen real animals in the jungle if they are given photos of said animals?

Thanks

pentaxuser

There is no way we can "get inside the head" of an indigenous person who has little experience with the modern world. We see things north, south, east, & west or upside down or right side up. The art of indigenous people where I come from depict the face, both sides, and maybe even internal bits on a flat plane all at the same time. Without knowing the 'language' of form lines or the use of positive and negative space, lots of people I know cannot pick out the individual animals or spirit figures in a design let alone know what way is up. So, in this case, we are the ones who cannot see it properly.

One film I saw, Contact (Prime Video) interviews a woman in her 60's who was in a group of Australian Aborigines that had never seen white people before, when she was a teenager in the 1960's. What makes the film powerful is that the white people took motion and still photos of the encounters and the woman's recollections allow a wee glimmer of understanding how strange it all was for her and her group.

The only first person account of this type of encounter I know of.

Helge · Jul 13, 2021

MurrayMinchin said:
There is no way we can "get inside the head" of an indigenous person who has little experience with the modern world. We see things north, south, east, & west or upside down or right side up. The art of indigenous people where I come from depict the face, both sides, and maybe even internal bits on a flat plane all at the same time. Without knowing the 'language' of form lines or the use of positive and negative space, lots of people I know cannot pick out the individual animals or spirit figures in a design let alone know what way is up. So, in this case, we are the ones who cannot see it properly.

One film I saw, Contact (Prime Video) interviews a woman in her 60's who was in a group of Australian Aborigines that had never seen white people before, when she was a teenager in the 1960's. What makes the film powerful is that the white people took motion and still photos of the encounters and the woman's recollections allow a wee glimmer of understanding how strange it all was for her and her group.

The only first person account of this type of encounter I know of.

Great post.
One the main reasons conventional ornament is less popular these days, is because people who own expensive stuff and architecture doesn't have a liberal arts education and therefore can't read it.
Good ornament is never random squiggles.
Classical ornament coasted on the fumes of a cargo cult, imitating, without getting it at all, among the socially climbing for a few decades. But petered out in the forties to seventies. Today merely being kitsch.
That might be a definition of kitsch really: The incomprehensible flotsam and jetsam of culture.

foc · Jul 13, 2021

MurrayMinchin said:
There is no way we can "get inside the head" of an indigenous person who has little experience with the modern world. We see things north, south, east, & west or upside down or right side up. The art of indigenous people where I come from depict the face, both sides, and maybe even internal bits on a flat plane all at the same time. Without knowing the 'language' of form lines or the use of positive and negative space, lots of people I know cannot pick out the individual animals or spirit figures in a design let alone know what way is up. So, in this case, we are the ones who cannot see it properly.

One film I saw, Contact (Prime Video) interviews a woman in her 60's who was in a group of Australian Aborigines that had never seen white people before, when she was a teenager in the 1960's. What makes the film powerful is that the white people took motion and still photos of the encounters and the woman's recollections allow a wee glimmer of understanding how strange it all was for her and her group.

The only first person account of this type of encounter I know of.

Thank you for posting the video link. I never heard of this type of encounter in the first person from the encountered. Usually, it is from the encounter's point of view, like in the documentary The Tribe That Hides From Man(1970).

MurrayMinchin · Jul 13, 2021

foc said:
Thank you for posting the video link. I never heard of this type of encounter in the first person from the encountered. Usually, it is from the encounter's point of view, like in the documentary The Tribe That Hides From Man(1970).

No problem. As I recall the film was sensitive to her peoples perspective. In a way it's a good thing it took so long for the film to be made, because if it had been made in the 60's, 70's, 80's or 1990's I don't think it would have been so respectful.

grain elevator · Jul 13, 2021

foc said:
Thank you for posting the video link. I never heard of this type of encounter in the first person from the encountered. Usually, it is from the encounter's point of view, like in the documentary The Tribe That Hides From Man(1970).

How do you determine who's encounterer and who's encountered? I'm not being facetious, but genuinely surprised that you see these different categories at work. When I'm taking the position of the ethnologist trying to understand your way of thinking about this, are you the encountered and I'm the encounterer or vice versa?
Sorry for the OT, carry on!

gone · Jul 13, 2021

I've been reading this book in stages. One minute you want to call McLuhan a big bag of hot air, and the next sentence you think, this guy is a genius. His thoughts on how the camera stops a moment in time hit home because until I seriously took up photography, I had no idea that 4 or 5 rapid photos of the same person would reveal 4 or 5 different looking people! Our facial expressions and just about everything within and without us is constantly changing, but we don't notice it until the camera magically stops things, and shows us an image we could never see w/o the photograph.

"Education is ideally civil defense against media fallout."..."our Western lives seem to native cultures to be one long series of preparations for living."... "The photograph might be said to have brought to human attention the subvisual world of bacteria that called for Louis Pasteur to be driven out of the medical profession by his indignant colleagues."..."To understand the photograph is quite impossible w/o grasping its relations to other media, both old and new". "In America, people can tolerate their images in mirror or photo, but they are made uncomfortable by the recorded sound of their own voices."

And my personal favorite, "The photo and visual worlds are secure areas of anesthesia." He left out books. After reading two pages of his, I need a nap

pentaxuser · Jul 13, 2021

In the past when photography was in existence but photographs were rarely seen in the vast majority of homes due to cost etc were there any examples of children who when given their first book which had to consist of mainly pictures were turning the pictures upside down due the failure of their reasoning to see the object as being in the correct orientation. Words, yes, quite possibly, as these are quite beyond a very young child's experience or even in the case of adults who are given text written in an alphabet they have never seen but I still have difficulty understanding why an object that a person, even a young person, has seen the correct way up, cannot differentiate between the right and wrong way up.

As a caveman father I might want to turn a picture of a sabre-toothed tiger the wrong way up for the kids for comical effect so they did the same to help reduce panic and have a laugh but I suspect they'd know which way up the tiger had to be to present a danger

He/she( the kid) may like the look of a picture the wrong way up as on occasions we adults may but it is not surely because of our inability to recognise which is the correct way up when it is a representation of an object we have seen in real life.

What is the body of expertise that is able to conclude that "indigenous people" fail to correlate a picture of something familiar to them to it being the right or wrong way up?

pentaxuser

MattKing · Jul 13, 2021

pentaxuser said:
What is the body of expertise that is able to conclude that "indigenous people" fail to correlate a picture of something familiar to them to it being the right or wrong way up

Isn't the question really whether they correlate a picture with the thing we think it portrays?

pentaxuser · Jul 14, 2021

MattKing said:
Isn't the question really whether they correlate a picture with the thing we think it portrays?

It might well be but I still genuinely cannot understand why a picture of a sledge, canoe, seal etc which the people in question, namely Eskimos, know and indeed for possibly survival have to know, fail to correlate an accurate representation of said object to the extent that they cannot work out which way up it should be. It might be my "modern western" brain and modern western life that enable me to do what the Eskimo cannot but I doubt that that alone is the full explanation. It may be that once you add the modifications and qualifications to that discovery of Eskimos inability to hand a picture the right way up then it becomes less mystical and those same modifications and qualifications would apply to all humans. There are times when "weird and wonderful" discoveries without detailed study can get close to "hot air"

Is there any studies on why this is and what the reasons are?

pentaxuser

Michel Hardy-Vallée · Jul 14, 2021

McLuhan is the kind of writer who got a lot of people excited at the time, but he is mainly a period piece by now. Academically speaking, he's worthless as a theoretical framework.

His cherry-picked stories about Indigenous people are downright racist and reflect more his colonial way of thinking than they say anything at all about the populations concerned.

In his excitable attempts at making grand pronouncements, epochal divisions, he ends up putting everything in the same basket, including myths and tall tales.

So yeah, the guy matters for history, and is endlessly quotable (if not readable, for he's an aphoristic swamp), but you can't take him seriously now.

MattKing · Jul 14, 2021

pentaxuser said:
It might well be but I still genuinely cannot understand why a picture of a sledge, canoe, seal etc which the people in question, namely Eskimos, know and indeed for possibly survival have to know, fail to correlate an accurate representation of said object to the extent that they cannot work out which way up it should be. It might be my "modern western" brain and modern western life that enable me to do what the Eskimo cannot but I doubt that that alone is the full explanation. It may be that once you add the modifications and qualifications to that discovery of Eskimos inability to hand a picture the right way up then it becomes less mystical and those same modifications and qualifications would apply to all humans. There are times when "weird and wonderful" discoveries without detailed study can get close to "hot air"

Is there any studies on why this is and what the reasons are?

pentaxuser

First, it is now considered by the Inuit to be offensive to refer to them as Eskimos (a label assigned to them by others). So tread carefully.
But more interestingly, why do you consider photographs to be accurate representations - they are two dimensional and they don't really look like the things you say they represent.
We are accustomed to think of photographs as being reasonable analogues of reality, but that comes from culture and training, not something innate.

Helge · Jul 14, 2021

Michel Hardy-Vallée said:
McLuhan is the kind of writer who got a lot of people excited at the time, but he is mainly a period piece by now. Academically speaking, he's worthless as a theoretical framework.

His cherry-picked stories about Indigenous people are downright racist and reflect more his colonial way of thinking than they say anything at all about the populations concerned.

In his excitable attempts at making grand pronouncements, epochal divisions, he ends up putting everything in the same basket, including myths and tall tales.

So yeah, the guy matters for history, and is endlessly quotable (if not readable, for he's an aphoristic swamp), but you can't take him seriously now.

That is the usual naive, woke, iconoclastic reaction these days to McLuhan.
But:
1. There is nothing new in that. He was accused of exactly the same things back when he had a large following.
2. He never aimed at being academic. His academic research was in literature. He was more than familiar with the aims and requirements of academic work.
3. He is never ever racist or xenophobic in his writings or talks (I challenge you to find just one example).
He is “putting us on” as he put it. Or gilding the lilly to so to speak. In interviews he almost never gives a straight answers when asked a question.
That’s because what he’s trying to get over is almost impossible to say in straight quantized known concepts and ideas.
He was trying to communicate a world view, a mind set, not some ideas that fit into other known ideas.
New, not news.

pentaxuser · Jul 14, 2021

MattKing said:
First, it is now considered by the Inuit to be offensive to refer to them as Eskimos (a label assigned to them by others). So tread carefully.
But more interestingly, why do you consider photographs to be accurate representations - they are two dimensional and they don't really look like the things you say they represent.
We are accustomed to think of photographs as being reasonable analogues of reality, but that comes from culture and training, not something innate.

Matt, I picked up the word Eskimo from momus' post who first mentioned it as his example but yes I remained ignorant of the term Eskimo being offensive until you pointed it out. It is not now nor ever was not my intention to use an offensive term
Yes, photographs are two dimensional and by that definition are not representations of reality but the rest we will have to differ on, Matt.

I cannot for the life of me work out what it is about culture and training that give's my brain the advantage in recognising a picture of a familiar object that seems not to be available to the Inuit in this case when he looks at an object familiar to him

However a beg to differ result is probably as good an end to this discussion as is possible so I'll leave it there. What we can agree on, I think, is that people have the same eyes to see the world but the picture in their brain can be different.

pentaxuser

VinceInMT · Jul 14, 2021

The density of his writing isn't surprising. I'm almost done with a retirement project, obtaining a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, and have been exposed to lots of this through the various art history classes I've taken in addition to the readings assigned in the studio art courses. Sontag, Barthes, Plato, Foucault, Derrida, Nietzsche, Kristeva, Kant, Freud, and many others use similar language in their attempt to convert thought into text. I usually read a few paragraphs and then ponder before moving on. I also take lots of notes along the way, summarizing what I think the author is trying to say in each section. Sometimes I get it, sometimes I don't.

MattKing · Jul 14, 2021

pentaxuser said:
I cannot for the life of me work out what it is about culture and training that give's my brain the advantage in recognising a picture of a familiar object that seems not to be available to the Inuit in this case when he looks at an object familiar to him

It is the concept of a two dimensional picture as a representation of reality that is culturally unfamiliar.

Marshall McLuhan writes about photography

gone

Helge

MurrayMinchin

Membership Council

jtk

pentaxuser

Helge

Alan Edward Klein

MurrayMinchin

Membership Council

pentaxuser

Helge

MurrayMinchin

Membership Council

Helge

foc

MurrayMinchin

Membership Council

grain elevator

gone

pentaxuser

MattKing

Moderator

pentaxuser

Michel Hardy-Vallée

Membership Council

MattKing

Moderator

Helge

pentaxuser

VinceInMT

MattKing

Moderator

Marshall McLuhan writes about photography

Membership Council

Membership Council

Membership Council

Membership Council

Moderator

Membership Council

Moderator

Moderator

Privacy & Transparency

Privacy & Transparency