Description
Impulse Editor:
Eldon Garnet.
Impressions Editor:
Isaac Applebaum. Newswire photographs.
Editorial:
These photographic reproductions constitute the raw material of our newspaper imagery. Transmitted as current through wire or as electromagnetic wave through the atmosphere: they are news photographs.
The photoelectric technology which produced these images is revolutionary yet archaic. These images represent a quarter century of photographic transmission employing electrosensitive paper as the recording medium, a technology which will soon be usurped by a more sophisticated process.
We have become acclimatized to the electric transmission of images through television, but it was not until the early 1950’s that the images no longer had to be carried by hand from point A to point B, but became electric, as the word had in the 19th century with the invention of the telegraph & the telephone. When artists first began producing multiple prints by means of the stone, metal, or wood plate they released the image from its one-of-a-kind preciousness as painting or illumination into a mass information vehicle able to exercise a pervasive influence.
As the identity of the early mass-media artist is generally unknown today so the person of the photographer & writer of the news photograph is submerged in an attitude of anonymous reporting of the news : the capitalist’s press articulates the desire to disseminate information which is an accurate, impartial, descriptive rendering. In our present electric era the news event has broadened, beyond recording the lives of power mongers, genocide & the machination of the beast, into a concern for individual men & women balanced on the edge of their particular lives. As history becomes more democratic & anonymous, the specific identities of the actors become less important than the metaphor of their actions.
In the electric news drama, our history, our myth, has become not the actions of a select few, but a complex collection of individual & group actions; it has become our total environment.
The play, the myth, the environment is endless, repetitious, fragmented, & being constantly adapted by the actors & audience as they freely interchange roles: every time an actor is killed, a part of the audience must also die.
The photographs of this book are presented in their original format, products of the K-300 receiver, offered as a few more edited random moments of our present history.
Eldon Garnet
