Photo-mechanical reproduction
The arguments of whether a photograph is truthful, or whether it is art, really pale into insignificance when what really mattered for the development of photography was the capacity for mass reproduction; that is photographs being used in newspapers and magazines with the development of half-tone printing in 1880, which is part of the electro-chemical-mechanical means of printing photographs by printing press still used today. The unfortunate truth of demand for imagery in publications, however, is that few photographs are used and not necessarily fully consumed at that. Alternatively, photographers often print one to ten enlarged prints for sale, claiming to destroy the (digital) negative to increase the value of their photographs. This conflicts with the spirit of Walter Benjamin’s recognition of one of photography’s greatest assets in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
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