A Democracy Of The Image By John Tagg Summary

In his chapter, A Democracy of the Image: Photographic Portraiture and Commodity Production, John Tagg writes about the development of photography itself – as a commodity and a historical artifact. He focuses on the history of portrait photography and how the development of numerous processes allowed people of different social classes to represent themselves. In the first section, Tagg discusses what a portrait photo represents, and why people take photos. He then notes the rapid growth of photography and how it also lead to opportunities in others subject areas other than art. He writes that “each of these images belongs to a distinct moment; each owes its qualities to particular conditions of production and it’s meaning to conventions

This however, sparked many experiments to be done, ultimately leading into the transformation of portraiture photography itself again. In 1878, Charles Harper Bennett developed gelatin that allowed for exposures to be done in twenty-fifth of a second. Manufacturing began and this process released the artist from limitation of always using the darkroom, with the new technique, plates could now be given to different people to develop. In addition, other materials also became quicker to use and this allowed the tripod to be disregarded and for the first time ever, the ‘camera’ could be held in ones hand. This completely changed the camera world and hand-held cameras took the society by storm, appearing on different markets in the 1880s. In 1888 George Eastman released his camera and named it the ‘Kodak’, wanting a different clientele, Eastman set out to focus sales and promotion to people who’ve never taken a photograph, making it possible that they did not have to go to a professional portraitist but allowing them to take it themselves and came up with the slogan: “You Press the Button and We Do the Rest’. A downfall was that this caused portraitists to go out of business but the whole process transformed the photography status. Finally, with the introduction of half-tone plates in 1880s, it enabled “economical and limitless reproduction of photographs in books, magazines, advertisements, and especially newspapers” the rapid usage of photos in such medias however; caused photos to become “so common as to be unremarkable.” Ultimately, portrait photography and photos became a burden because they were found in files at places such as; police stations, hospitals, schoolrooms, and prisons. So it was no longer a privilege or a way of willing representation