We’re One Big Family in the Camera’s Eye

Almost from the day (150 years ago this week) Louis Daguerre introduced photography to the world, our appetite for reproduced images has been fierce. Today, our entire culture is dominated by the camera and its technological offspring. The whole world reaches us in pictures--color pictures in the newspaper, moving pictures at the cinema, live ones on TV, insinuating ones on billboards--and we seem always to want more, more. Music itself, once content to be lent an ear, now claims our eyes as well, as the pop music train is pulled along by the locomotive of video.

One picture in particular seems to be enjoying not just a vogue these days but an almost mystical popularity: the image of our planet seen clearly from space. It’s in the news, in our advertising and corporate logos, in our art and our literature. Earth seen from space, the blue-green sphere neatly framed by the screen, seems to capture our cares about ecology, our hopes for peace, our pride in a planet that can send back pictures of itself from so far off.

There’s almost a rhythm to the stages by which such imagery has overtaken our culture, a 50-year beat of innovation. Photography began with the daguerreotype 150 years ago; moving pictures arrived 50 years later, TV broadcasting 50 years after that. The global telecommunications network, the satellites and cables that now form the planet’s nervous system, bombards us nonstop with an indigestible array of images, emotions, distant events.

The confluence of these anniversaries reminds us how much of what we call culture is in fact the multiplication and miniaturization of images. We love to multiply images of our world, and we love to miniaturize them; that’s what our photos do, that’s what our novels, and our newspapers, our televisions and our toys do.

Kids love little dolls and toy trains because they offer miniature worlds where the child has control. We respond to the same charm, I think, in front of our photo albums, our magazines, our ubiquitous screens. They all offer us miniature reproductions, manageable re-creations, of the world around us that lacks focus, lacks a frame.

To multiply our images of the world is almost a divine prerogative, when you think about it. You create something new, so familiar (in your image!) and yet so easily achieved, with each trip of the shutter. Perhaps, though, photography and its continual reinventions are more reverent forms of behavior, as if, in obedience to the Biblical injunction to Be fruitful and multiply, humanity had responded not only biologically, but also with the printing press, the camera and the screen.

One hundred and fifty years of being able to seize the world, yet leave it alone; of being able to see the familiar afresh; of being able to see far off in space and time. It’s a mere century and a half that the images of loved ones have gathered around us so abundantly, and that history--current, living history--has been everyone’s to witness. Surely the occasion, the smiling anniversary of a French scenery- painter’s inspiration, is worth a celebration, worth remembering.

OK, now .. everybody say “Cheese!�