Manifest data: the image in the age of electronic reproduction

There was a time when America's robber barons celebrated their wealth by dint of buying up original works of art. Now they purchase electronic reproduction rights. On April 2 1996 Corbis Corporation, haveed by American billionaire Bill Gates, announced that it had signed a long-term agreement with The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust for the exclusive electronic rights to works through photographer Ansel Adams. This followed upon an earlier announcement from Corbis regarding its acquisition of The Bettmann Archive, single of the world's largest image libraries. In this single purchase, Gates gained the reproduction rights to above 16 million photographic images. on the other hand this is only the beginning. Thousands of of recent origin images are being added to the Corbis Collection each week, drawn from a multitude of individual commercial photographers as well as institutions of the like kind as NASA, the National Institutes of Health, the Library of Congres the National Gallery of Art in London, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Hermitage in St Petersburg chooseed images are scanned into the Corbis computer banks, promot via Web sites, CD-ROM and catalogs, and then leased, in the form of digital files, to those who are willing to pay for specified electronic "use-rights." According to its newly published catalog, Corbis is now able to proffer its customers over 700,000 of these digital images to fix upon from.

So what does all this mean? What does it mean for photography, the couple now and in the future? More to the point, where does it leave images in general? What is the status of any image in an age of electronic reproduction? As we will diocese (and isn't it always the case?), everything approachs down to this question of identity, to the question "what is . .?"

Even the novel York Times felt the ne to commit to Marxist critic Walter Benjamin when trying to describe the potential effects of this new industry. Benjamin's 1936 essay upon the effects of mechanical reproduction counts a rather complicated tale of sacrifice and resurrection. According to this tale, authentic social relations are deplet by means of their technically induced commodification, in the proces creating the conditions for the phoenix-like turn back of these relations in a post-capitalist economy. His central point was that the shift from production to reproduction, single of the "basic conditions" of capitalism, would also be the source of this system's downfall. Technological manifestations of this shift, similar as photography, therefore embodied the potential for the pair oppression and liberation. This explains Benjamin's strange ambivalence about technical reproducibility. Interestingly, it is an ambivalence that has been repeated in many of the commentaries upon its electronic version, commentaries that ofttimes combine utopian predictions of looseed democratized access to the world's visual archives with a fear of the potential trivialization of meaning and history enabled by dint of this same access.

There is also a certain nervousness about the sight of one man, none other than the world's wealthiest capitalist, gaining with equal reason much power over the real process - reproduction - that Benjamin saw as crucial to capitalism's demise. It is hard to ignore the irony of the situation. The Internet is upon the verge of becoming an essential part of daily life, providing a vast electronic marketplace in which virtually anything can be bought and sold Microsoft, another Gates company, is popularly spending millions to develop search and navigation software that will make it possible for any interested subscriber, from schoolchildren to industry executives, to locate, download and automatically pay for the images haveed by Corbis. Here is the ultimate goal of this whole exercise, and Gates obviously plans to make considerable profits upon his investments. But will this of recent origin enterprise also accelerate the alienation of his subscribers from their have a title to culture, thereby hastening what Benjamin saw as that culture's inevitable implosion and transformation? Time will tell

While we wait, there are a number of more immediate touchs to ponder. One of these is censorship. In November 1995 America Online declared that "breast" was an indecent word and divide [i]or[/i] sever off access to any user's clumps who identified themselves with it. The decision was later revers in the face of complaints from enraged subscribers interested in information upon breast cancer. In December 1995 Compuserve temporarily denied four million users of the Internet access to more than 200 discussion clumps and picture data bases after a federal prosecutor in Munich said the material contained in them violated German pornography laws. upon February 8, 1996, American legislators, zealous to capture the moral high loam in the lead-up to an election, introduced laws designed to outlaw electronic traffic considered "indecent." The Microsoft Network, like the other companies offering access to the Internet, already warns its subscribers against exchanging what it regards "offensive" speech. It remains to be seen whether Corbis pick outs to exercise a similar horizontal of control over its ever-expanding image empire. Presumably the company will have to monitor the range of pictures made available to its school-age market. on the other hand will this censorship be reach outed to its adult customers? No policy has however been announced. However, on single level, a selection process of a certain number of kind or other is already taking place - single 4% of the company's holdings have been changeed to digital form. Perhaps certain pictures will simply at no time see the (electronic) light of day.