On The Reproducibility Of Photographic Work
An artisan’s work is that of the hands. Making is a sort of channeling of essence of the maker, the made and counterparts that make it to a single object; the Product. The maker lives uniquely, as experiences, in each make. The final product, besides being unique from the rest despite having the same measurements, also carries with it a unique form of the essence of its maker. Experiencing the product immediately implies experiencing the refined essence of its maker.
The industrial age has undermined this experience, for practical reasons of course. One of the ways industries undermine makers is through their ability of reproducing anything. When a product is easy to remake through the same process, using the same machinery, using the same process to do it, it begins to lose touch with its uniqueness. It is no longer a little bit different than its band of brothers.
To an extent, reproducibility of artistic work undermines its uniqueness. The work begins to lose a sense of divinity it once carried with it through the way one work is not the same as the other. Science relies heavily on consistency to make its deductions, hence why it is objective and logical at the way it studies the world. The world, falsely assumed by science as a state of consistent truths that recur when certain preconditions are met is highly unpredictable. Thus science either does not allow the existence of subjective, variable experiences or compensates for it through a series of objective, consistent experiences. It is the only way science understands the world. It is what makes the perception of science to be reliable.
The process of reproducing an art is a science. Through the reproduced art, the subjectivity of the experience of the art begins to fade. We are beginning to see repetitive objectification of subjective experiences.
Social media platforms such as Instagram, besides reducing the photograph to just another image on a screen, further reduce the subjective experience each photograph is ready to give by having one photograph closely above the other as this makes scrolling easier than stopping to observe; the like button is a convenient tool to simply stop by for seconds, see the image, and decide quickly whether the image deserves it or not. This is especially true when one doesn’t stop and read through the caption regardless of how long the written material is.
Just how it is done for objectivity in science, one can/should enhance the role of subjectivity through making more and more unique experiences in forms of art. Even when viewed on screen, photography can still preserve its inherent subjective experience. Besides aesthetic and/or emotive quality, its production quality can be felt even when viewed on screen. An instance worth mentioning is the way some artists present the methods and process used in the making of the image. This gives the viewer some idea — a glimpse of sorts, if the viewer’s experience and imagination are broad — as to how the image is to be produced and presented which in turn makes up for the somehow lost, or at least, washed out version of the subjective experience given by the photograph.