Junk for Code

the politics of pictures

John Hartley in his search for the public in the age of the media in
Politics of Pictures says the following:

"Chapter 2 begins the forensic analysis of the public domain by tracing it to its classical roots, the Greek agora or Roman forum: the physical public sphere at the centre of the city state, wherein the public actually congregated in order to conduct political, legal, religious and market affairs. Now its gone; there is no public space. It hasn't disappeared but gone private and turned into pictures."

You've guessed it. Everybody's at home watching the telly. That implies that the media are the public sphere. Hartley is explict about this:

"Television, popular newspapers, magazines and photography, the popular media of the modern period, are the public domain, the place where and the means by which the public is created and has its being."

We sit at home watching pictures and so contemporary politics is conducted in the private and personal realm. But Hartley goes beyond the obvious media like television and the news to pictures such as record covers, postcards, musems, advertisements, magazines etc What we get is a visual sense-making.

They are waiting there like dead bodies/things to be forensically dissected and interpreted.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at July 12, 2005 10:48 PM | TrackBack