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Themesicon: navigation pathPhoto/Byteicon: navigation pathArchive—post/photographic
 
Globen/Globes (Binschtok, Viktoria), 2002Transmission Interrupted (Brodsky, Michael), 1995
 
 
 

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photography. Digital cameras, even digital video cameras, have smoothly followed the use of photographic and videographic techniques in the recording of high points in the family, the growing up of the children, the vacation, etc. There is no visible change in pragmatics due to the transition to digital media at this level. [71] What is more remarkable is that the way people treat images has changed. The images may still be printed out, pasted into photo albums and provided with brief, personal, selfassuring narratives; however, homepages in the World Wide Web permit the same thing. In this way, private narratives—in principle at least—are made public. [72] In addition, the images can be relatively easily sent via E-mail (in this respect refer to the contribution by Kathrin Peters, «Instant Images»).

One of the most conspicuous forms in which the transition of private image production into the public becomes evident is the inflationary proliferation of amateur pornography. It has now become possible for anyone to pass his or her own sex practices on to the public in an exhibitionistic way—one of the pertinent image archives in the Web in which countless

 

photographs of this kind can be found (a total of 1,968,947 in 655 categories on 12/12/04) in categories such as «alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.amateur.facials» is www.pictureview.com. Moreover, there are many Web sites on which private individuals market their individual pornographic image archives in a hyperexhibitionistic way. Capitalist circulation now also includes—in a way Sir Oliver Wendell Holmes would certainly never been able to imagine—private image archives. Likewise, ebay—the world's largest electronic auction house for merchandise that is otherwise only marketable within bounds—has transformed the entire home into a part of the global market (in this respect refer to the work «Globen/Globes» by Viktoria Binschtok and Peter Piller). The tendency is that in the space of post-photographic neoliberalism, private photographs are becoming what they emphatically precisely not were for a long time: commodities.

In his work «Transmission InterruptedMichael Brodsky responded both to the dominance of pornographic images in the Internet as well as the central role of transmission. The more recent works by Thomas Ruff also seem to react to these developments:

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