Vilem Flusser in his book “Towards a philosophy of photography” posits that there are fundamental turning points in the relationship between image and text.
In the beginning there were only images, the first images that man saw on rock paintings or in cave paintings. Since text did not exist to help decode them, Vilem Flusser considers images magical as did the people looking at them. He considers that, the first fundamental turning point.
The second one is the invention of writing which helps decoding the images. This is when images lose their magic power.
The third fundamental turning point is the invention of printing and its consequent universal proliferation, the extensive use of pictures in books to help contextualise the text.
Lastly, the fourth fundamental turning point when the images have become such an integral part of the books, that they have ostracized the text. Standing alone, without needing the text to decode them, they have regained their magical power.
The meteoric rise of the digital image, the ease with which we create and share it, has diminished the appeal of text. We are now inundated with billions of images, but we no longer have access to the text necessary to decode them.
Digital photography is the obvious case in point. Every day we are bombarded with increasingly impressive photos, created using a huge range of techniques and processing, with no text attached. We look at them and assess them according to the impression they make and the “magical” aura that surrounds them.
Where will today’s dominance of the “magical” image lead us?
The creative process:
Petroglyphs from all over the world in caves and on rocks are the inspiration for the forms I created. The figures were etched on Linoleum and printed using the traditional engraving method end then printed on a pre-existed photo. The first and the last «magic» image together.
