Available Means of Persuasion, The. David M. Sheridan
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gaining power . . . over one’s image; of presenting arguments and demands; of stimulating action. (290)
Slater and Tagg, however, both argue that the political potential of the camera has not been fully realized. To be clear, Slater and Tagg are not arguing that ordinary citizens have never used cameras for political or activist purposes. Instead, they are making a more general claim about the way a number of material and cultural pressures circumscribe political uses of the camera.
Tagg explains that technologies relevant to the photographic process “only passed into popular hands in the crudest sense of the term” and important “technical and cultural knowledge” remained unavailable to ordinary camera-users (17, 18). Anyone could snap a photograph, but in the age of film-based photography, most camera-users did not (for instance) own a darkroom equipped with the chemicals, enlargers, papers, and filters necessary to take advantage of the full range of photographic expression. Instead, most amateur photographers had their prints developed at local photomarts, thereby relinquishing the ability to make the rhetorical decisions that professional photographers routinely made in the darkroom: the ability to adjust contrast and tonality, to make precise determinations about how an image is cropped, to select an appropriate size and shape for the print, and more. Moreover, photography has been situated within a cultural hierarchy that privileged professionals and artists while it relegated amateurs to the domain of “kitsch” (19).
Slater examines other forces that have limited the ability of nonspecialists to deploy in photographic rhetoric, pointing to the effects of “high pressure mass marketing of photographic equipment” that relegates the use of cameras to nonpolitical purposes (290). Slater concludes that the “enormous productive power” of the camera “is effectively contained as a conventionalized, passive, privatized and harmless leisure activity. The mass of photography—snapshooting—is hardly a conscious activity at all: it is an undeliberated moment spliced into the flow of certain ritual events: watching the baby, being at a tourist site, spending Sunday with the grandparents” (289; see also, Tagg 18).
The case of the motion picture camera is strikingly parallel to the case of the still camera. Early on, observers were aware that the movie camera could potentially be appropriated by ordinary citizens to effect social change (Winston 67). As Brian Winston and others have demonstrated, however, a complex set of cultural and material pressures severely curtailed radical use of the movie camera and related technologies. Winston argues against the “technological determinist view” that sees technologies as having self-evident and self-realizing potentials. In this view, “[w]hat the technology can deliver is what the technology will deliver” (86). “On the contrary,” Winston argues, “technology is always responsive to forces outside itself” (86). The practice of using 35mm film is a case in point. Winston shows that the 35mm standard was perpetuated not because of “utility” but because of “unexamined cultural prejudice” including technology developers’ tendency “to work with film strips in culturally familiar widths” (59). Initially the result of a one-inch wide image plus sprocket holes, the 35mm standard was “naturalized” and continued to be enforced throughout subsequent decades. Amateurs paid the price for this naturalization. Using 35mm film, “required cameras (and, of course, projectors) somewhat too large to be sold to the public, inhibiting the growth of amateur cinematography” (60).
Eventually alternate standards more conducive to amateur cinematography were developed—16mm and 8mm films that were less expensive and more portable—but these formats were seen as substandard and nonserious. Echoing Slater’s analysis of the still camera, Patricia Rodden Zimmermann shows that the “definition” of nonprofessional use of film “narrowed . . . to a nonserious, leisure-time activity bolstering family solidarity and consumption” (145). Amateur film was “marginalized . . . as a hobby to fill up leisure time and as a retreat from social and political participation” (145–46). This marginalization was not inevitable, but was accomplished through the complex set of cultural and material forces, including “[t]echnical standards, aesthetic norms, socialization pressures, and political goals derailed its cultural construction into a privatized, almost silly, hobby” (157). Despite these pressures, Zimmermann ends with the hope that future constructions of amateur film “may liberate it as a more accessible and meaningful form of personal expression and social and political intervention” (157).
The same cultural pressures that limited the political use of cameras remain operational in the digital age. Apple, for instance, has developed a remarkable suite of applications packaged as iLife. These applications include tools for archiving and manipulating still images, making videos, composing music, and burning DVDs, but they are marketed via images of leisure-time consumption that recall the Kodak marketing Slater discusses. A recent advertisement asks, for instance, “What if you could command an entire world of music, photos, movies and DVDs—all from your sofa? Now you can share the good life with friends and family on a . . . new iMac G5” (“Mac Expo”). Like the camera, iLife is positioned within a discourse that tends to render it politically innocuous rather than one that underscores its radical possibilities. GarageBand, an iLife application for composing music, seems to locate itself, by its very name, in the domain of trivial recreation rather than serious social action.
The evolution of digital technologies themselves also strikingly echoes the evolution of the camera. Slater notes that in its pursuit of the widest possible market share, Kodak’s goal was to make the camera as easy to use as possible. This imperative simultaneously resulted in cameras that were more restrictive (lacking features and settings available to professionals) and in consumption practices characterized by unthinking, unreflective use. “Point-and-shoot” became both a technical achievement and a (passive, depoliticized) mode of use. Likewise, newer versions of iMovie lack useful features available in older versions, rendering it easier to use, but more restrictive. That is, certain rhetorical options that were available in earlier versions were lacking or more difficult to access in later versions.
To sum up: the cases of the still and movie cameras reveal that a complex web of forces interact to shape the way a technology is developed and adopted. Technologies never have a completely independent “life of their own”; they do not inevitably yield their full potential to society (Winston 86). Instead, a constellation of cultural and material factors influence how they are used and by whom. To operationalize the full potential of technologies on behalf of social justice, we need to better understand the material-cultural dynamics that govern the development and uses of technologies. Slater, following Raymond Williams, observes, “any medium must be analysed not only in terms of its present use (a restriction which encourages technologism) but also in terms of its potential forms” (289-90, emphasis added).
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