Manifest Data: The Image in the Age of Electronic Reproduction

There was a time when America's robber barons celebrated their wealth by buying up original works of art. Now they buy electronic reproduction rights. On April 2, 1996, Corbis Corporation, owned by American billionaire Bill Gates, announced that it had signed a long-term agreement with The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust for the exclusive electronic rights to works by photographer Ansel Adams. This followed on an earlier announcement from Corbis regarding its acquisition of The Bettmann Archive, one of the world's largest image libraries. In this one purchase, Gates gained the reproduction rights to over 16 million photographic images. But this is only the beginning. Thousands of new images are being added to the Corbis Collection every week, drawn from a multitude of individual commercial photographers as well as institutions such as NASA, the National Institutes of Health, the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art in London, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. Selected images are scanned into the Corbis computer banks, promoted via Web sites, CD-ROMs and catalogs, and then leased, in the form of digital files, to those who are willing to pay for specified electronic use-rights. According to its newly published catalog, Corbis is now able to offer its customers over 700,000 of these digital images to choose from. So does all this mean? What does it mean for photography, both now and in the future? More to the point, where does it leave images in general? What is the status of any image in an age of electronic reproduction? As we will see (and isn't it always the case?), everything comes down to this question of identity, to the question what is . . .? Even the New York Times felt the need to refer to Marxist critic Walter Benjamin when trying to describe the potential consequences of this new industry. Benjamin's 1936 essay on the effects of mechanical reproduction tells a rather complicated tale of sacrifice and resurrection. According to this tale, authentic social relations are depleted by their technically induced commodification, in the process creating the for the phoenix-like return of these relations in a post-capitalist economy. His central point was that the shift from production to reproduction, one of the basic conditions of capitalism, would also be the source of this system's downfall. Technological manifestations of this shift, such as photography, therefore embodied the potential for both oppression and liberation. This explains Benjamin's strange ambivalence about technical reproducibility. Interestingly, it is an ambivalence that has been repeated in many of the commentaries on its electronic version, commentaries that often combine utopian predictions of unfettered democratized access to the world's visual archives with a fear of the potential trivialization of meaning and history enabled by this same access. There is also a certain nervousness about the prospect of one man, none other than the world's wealthiest capitalist, gaining so much power over the very process - reproduction - that Benjamin saw as crucial to capitalism's demise. It is hard to ignore the irony of the situation. The Internet is on the verge of becoming an essential part of daily life, providing a vast electronic marketplace in which virtually anything can be bought and sold. Microsoft, another Gates company, is currently spending millions to develop search and navigation software that will make it possible for any interested subscriber, from schoolchildren to industry executives, to locate, download and automatically pay for the images owned by Corbis. Here is the ultimate goal of this whole exercise, and Gates obviously plans to make considerable profits on his investments. But will this new enterprise also accelerate the alienation of his subscribers from their own culture, thereby hastening Benjamin saw as that culture's inevitable implosion and transformation? …