European Journal of Scientific Research - EuroJournals

748 Muhammad Nawaz Mahsud, Muhammad Khalid and Firasat Jabeen
we also have an interest in pictures for communication, pictures to transmit information among
ourselves as well as between our increasingly sophisticated information-processing machines and us.
The challenge in the design of a picture is the decision what to preserve and what to discard
(http://human-factors.arc.nasa.gov/ihh/spatial/papers/pdfs_se/pcpsu/Ellis-1993-pictorialcommunication.htm/).
To understand the medium of the photograph is quite impossible, then, without
grasping its relations to other media, both old and new. The photo and visual worlds are secure areas of
anesthesia. A picture of a group of persons of any hue whatever is a picture of people, not of “colored
people.” The logic of the photograph is neither verbal nor syntactical, a condition that renders literary
culture quite helpless to cope with the photograph. By the same token, the complete transformation of
human sense-awareness by this form involves a development of self-consciousness that alters facial
expression and cosmetic makeup as immediately as it does our bodily stance, in public or in private
(McLuhan, 2002).
The photograph is just as useful for collective, as for individual, postures and gestures, whereas
written and printed language is biased toward the private and individual posture. It was in 1839 that
William Henry Fox Talbot read a paper to the Royal Society which had a title: “Some Account of the
Art of Photogenic Drawing, or the process by which natural objects may be made to delineate
themselves without the aid of the artist’s pencil.” He was quite aware of photography as a kind of
automation that eliminated the syntactical procedures of pen and pencil. He was probably less aware
that he had brought the pictorial world into line with the new industrial procedures. It was this allimportant
quality of uniformity and repeatability that had made the Gutenberg breaks between the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance (p. 204). Historical pictorial collections can range from thousands to
millions of images, most of which are originals and many of which are also of unique art factual value.
Most collections, encompassing photographs and works on paper, include documentary photographs,
fine and popular prints and drawings, posters, and architectural and engineering drawings. Among the
many media included are glass-plate and film negatives; daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and tintypes;
silver gelatin prints and color transparencies; lithographs, woodcuts, and etchings; and pen-and-ink,
watercolor, and chalk drawing (http://www.clir.Org/pubs/reports/ostrow/pub71.htm/).
As Evan (1999) explains it, a still image, such as a photograph of a woman, is less the
equivalent of “woman” than it is a series of disconnected descriptions: “an older woman, seen in the
distance wearing a green coat, watching the traffic, as she crosses the road.” She also tells us that
pictures have no tense, and thus no clear location in time. He reveals how many photographs, which
make an impact on the consciousness of the public, photographs that seem to symbolize something
about the human condition, have been obtained with less than scrupulous honesty. It presents us, says
Evans, with an object as a fait accompli. Visual images are inevitably ambiguous and polysemic, but
they also have certain advantages over words. One is their greater denotative power when used
deliberately and effectively. Another is their capacity to become icons – directly representing some
concept with clarity, impact and wide recognition. This gives them considerable potential for skilful
communication in certain contexts (McQuail, 2005, p. 349).
Sontag (1978) states that ‘the images that have virtually unlimited authority in a modern society
is mainly photographic images.’ A painting is ‘never more than the stating of an interpretation’, while a
photograph: ‘is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) –
material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be. The image/photograph is not the reality
itself, but, ‘at least … its perfect analogon.’ So, in the first place, the photograph is supposed to
transmit literal reality. In the second, it is an analogon: it is exactly similar to the reality it transmits.
Photographs have most usually been described as ‘icons’, because of their apparent ability to reproduce
some elements of reality. Since the photograph appears, at first sight, to be extremely close to the thing
it represents, the many claims made for its ability to transmit ‘the literal reality’ seem convincing (pp.
3). Photography has taught people a new way of seeing the world. There are quite extensive moral
implications which arise from this code: ‘In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and
enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. She believed that:
‘photographed images… now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past