Page 59 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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44 Then
images are at odds with photographic representation … from
the perspective of memory, photography appears as a jumble
that consists partly of garbage.
(Kracauer 1995: 50–1)
He contrasts the characteristics peculiar to a conceptualization of
history premised upon non-mediated memory and the substantive
meaning found in a ‘liberated consciousness’ with the much more
arbitrary information presented by the technological mediation of
the photograph: ‘This history omits all characteristics and determi-
nations that do not relate in a significant sense to the truth intended
by a liberated consciousness … In a photograph, a person’s history is
buried as if under a layer of snow’ (1995: 51; emphasis added).
Unlike Benjamin’s underdeveloped and rather vague notion of
distraction, Kracauer is unambiguous in the implications photography
has for human cognition. He talks of how ‘the flood of photos
sweeps away the dams of memory’ (1995: 58) a process accelerated
now by their seamless integration with other media formats and
platforms (computers, mobile phones, and so on).
Working in a journalistic environment in the relatively early days
of mass-media technologies, Kracauer was particularly sensitive to the
implications of introducing images to the predominantly textual
format of the newspaper.
The aim of the illustrated newspapers is the complete repro-
duction of the world accessible to the photographic appara-
tus … never before has an age been so informed about itself, if
being informed means having an image of objects that resem-
bles them in a photographic sense … In reality, however, the
weekly photographic ratio does not at all mean to refer to these
objects or ur-images.
(Kracauer 1995: 58)

Here he identifies a central paradox that we revisit in Chapter 8 –
the irony that in an age of unprecedented visuality and ease of
image production, media technologies actually tend to alienate us
more, not less, from our surroundings. In the above excerpt,
Kracauer problematizes the word informed. He is pointing out that
photographs only inform us to the extent that they provide us with
images of objects that resemble rather than equate to the objects
they are portraying. Because a photograph is an objectively recorded,
mechanized/chemical capturing of a moment in space and time, the
realism of its content’s presentation tends to be taken for granted.
What Kracauer’s analysis highlights, however, is that ‘the weekly
photographic ratio’ (the increase in the number of images made
available to us) creates its own cognitive impact. There is an
aggregative effect in experiencing hitherto unprecedented numbers

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