spectres and fossils

snapchat

the persistent image:
is what Andreas Kitzmann called a “museal gesture,” what Jean Baudrillard called “museumification,” and what André Bazin called the “mummy complex,”

Idolatrous forms of behaviour / miley cyrus

    

proskuneo (pros-koo-neh'-o); 

From pros and a probable derivative of kuon (meaning to kiss, like a dog licking his master's hand); to fawn or crouch to, i.e. (literally or figuratively) prostrate oneself in homage (do reverence to, adore)

Idolatrous forms of behaviour ///  kissing, licking or offering money to relics and images.

☭☭☭☭☭☭symbol of the industrial proletariat☭☭☭☭☭☭☭☭☭☭☭tool of the iconoclast☭☭☭☭☭

The evidence to prove the first generall branch of his Charge, con|cerning the alteration, ub version of Religion.

To begin with his owne Kennel at Lambeth: We shall first lead you by the hand into his publike Chapell there, a place devoted to Gods worship, and evidence what Popish Superstitious, Pictures, Vtensils, Vestments, Ceremonies, Innovati|ons he there introduced, and constantly practised since his instalment in the Arch|bishopricke of Canterburie, never heard off in any his Predecessors dayes since the beginning of reformation in King Edward the 6th. and Queene Elizabeths reignes.
First, we shall manifest what Idolatrous, superstitious Popish Pictures were there newly repaired, furbished, erected by him in this Chappell, to the great scan|dall of our Religion, and encouragement of Papists in their Idolatry, contrary to our Statutes, Articles of Religion, Homilies, Jnjunctions, Writer, & the established Doctrine of our Church, wherein the matter of fact stands thus: In the beginning of Reformation by vertue of the Statute of 3. and 4. Ed. 6. c. 10. for the abolishing, de|facing, and putting away of divers Bookes and Jmages then standing in any Church or Chapell; of the severall Homilies against the Perill of Jdolatry, then published by Au|thority, & of Queen Elizabeths subsequent Jnjunctions (given by her as well to the Clergy as Laity of this Realme, by the advise of her most honourable Councell in the first yeare of her Raigne, for the advancement of the honour of Almighty God, and sup|pression of superstition throughout her Realmes, Injunction, 2. 3. 23. 25. and Articles of in|quiry thereon: Artic. 2. 45. which enjoyned, All Pictures, Paintings, Images, and other monuments of Idolatry, and superstition to be utterly extinct, removed, abolished and dis|troyed, so that there remaine no memory of the same in Walls, Glassewindows, or else where within any Churches or Houses: the Idolatrous superstitious Pictures set up in times of Popery in the Glassewindowes of the Chapell at Lambeth house, were a|mong others defaced, demolished in such sort, that nought but a few broken imper|fect fragments of them remained, peeced up with white incoherent Glasse, and so continued altogether unrepaired, unfurbished, and utterly neglected, till this super|stitious Arch Prelate was translated to the See of Canterbury after the death of Dr. Georg Abbot, as was attested by Sir Nathaniel Brent, Vicar Generall, Dr. Daniel Featly household Chaplin to Archbishop Abbot, and Mr. Pryn, who had beene out in that Chappel, & exactly viewed it in Abbots dayes and since: But no sooner was the Prisouer at the Bar, W. Laud translated from London to Lambeth, but with all expe|dition & care, to his great cost [as appeares by the Glasiers Bills] he caused these demo|lished superstitious Pictures in the Glassewindowes to be repaired, furbished, beauti|fied, and made more compleat and accurate with new painted Glasse, then ever be|fore, setting them up againe in fresh lively colours, according to the very Patterne in the great Roman Missall, or Masse Book (which he had diligently noted with his own hand almost in every Page) so as no Chappel in Rome could be more Idolatrous, Po|pish, superstitious in regard of such offensive Pictures, then his at Lambeth, the par|ticulars whereof, after (a late double serious view) were thus attested before the Lords upon Oath, by Mr. William Pryn, Mr. Pember (the Glasier who helped to repaire and set them up) Mr. Dell the Archbishops owne secretary: Mr. Browne (his Ioyner) Sir Nathaniel Brent, and Dr. Featley.
That in the East Window of the Archbishops Chappel at Lambheth just over the high Altar (there newly erected) consisting of five severall Panes, there was in the middle pane in painted Glasse, a large Crucifix, or Picture of our Saviour Christ hanging on the Crosse, under which were the Picturs of a Scul, & of dead mens bones, with a Baskit full of Tooles, Nailes, and Round about the Crucifix were the High Priests with their Officers an horsebacke, and some Souldiers with others who crucified Christ, & the 2. theeves standing on foot; which portrature was taken out of the very expresse patterne thereof in the Archbishops owne Roman Missall


2ly. As he new moulded his Chappell Windowes; so he likewise altered the ancient Communion Table; standing with the ends East and West, some distance from the Wall Table-wise, even from the beginning of Reformation till his comming to the Arch-Bishopricke without any Rayle about it, into a New Altar placed Altar|wise against the Wall, with the ends North and South, hedged in with a new cost|ly Raile. Attested by Doctor Featly, Sir Nathaniell Brent, and Master Pryn.

EEBO 

 

laws against images

[T]he great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Spinoza's stone

Further conceive, I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavoring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavor and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.

 

.......

Could one imagine a stone's having consciousness? And if anyone can do so—why should that not merely prove that such image-mongery is of no interest to us? Wittgenstien PI / 390

The Stereoscope and the Stereograph

Form is henceforth divorced from matter. In fact, matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which form is shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing, taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it. Pull it down or burn it up, if you please. We must, perhaps, sacrifice some luxury in the loss of color; but form and light and shade are the great things, and even color can be added, and perhaps by and by may be got direct from Nature.
There is only one Coliseum or Pantheon; but how many millions of potential negatives have they shed,—representatives of billions of pictures,—since they were erected! Matter in large masses must always be fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable. We have got the fruit of creation now, and need not trouble ourselves with the core. Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins, and leave the carcasses as of little worth.
The consequence of this will soon be such an enormous collection of forms that they will have to be classified and arranged in vast libraries, as books are now. The time will come when a man who wishes to see any object, natural or artificial, will go to the Imperial, National, or City Stereographic Library and call for its skin or form, as he would for a book at any common library. We do now distinctly propose the creation of a comprehensive and systematic stereographic library, where all men can find the special forms they particularly desire to see as artists, or as scholars, or as mechanics, or in any other capacity.


Again, we must have special stereographic collections, just as we have professional and other special libraries. And as a means of facilitating the formation of public and private stereographic collections, there must be arranged a comprehensive system of exchanges, so that there may grow up something like a universal currency of these bank-notes, or promises to pay in solid substance, which the sun has engraved for the great Bank of Nature.

The next European war will send us stereographs of battles. It is asserted that a bursting shell can be photographed. The time is perhaps at hand when a flash of light, as sudden and brief as that of the lightning which shows a whirling wheel standing stock still, shall preserve the very instant of the shock of contact of the mighty armies that are even now gathering. The lightning from heaven does actually photograph natural objects on the bodies of those it has just blasted,—so we are told by many witnesses. The lightning of clashing sabres and bayonets may be forced to stereotype itself in a stillness as complete as that of the tumbling tide of Niagara as we see it self-pictured.
We should be led on too far, if we developed our belief as to the transformations to be wrought by this greatest of human triumph over earthly conditions, the divorce of form and substance. Let our readers fill out a blank check on the future as they like,—we give our indorsement to their imaginations beforehand. We are looking into stereoscopes as pretty toys, and wondering over the photograph as a charming novelty; but before another generation has passed away, it will be recognized that a new epoch in the history of human progress dates from the time when He who

never but in uncreated light
Dwelt from eternity—

took a pencil of fire from the hand of the "angel standing in the sun," and placed it in the hands of a mortal.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Reckitt's Blue, Bag Blue, Paris Blue, Crown Blue, Laundry Blue, Dolly Bags,

The best Method of making and using Starch

Moisten the quantity of starch you want to use, according to the quantity of your cloaths, with water, and put as much stone blue as is necessary. When the starch and blue are properly mixed, then let the whole boil together a quarter of an hour longer, taking care to keep stirring it, because that makes it much stiffer and is better for the linen. Such things as you would have most stiff, ought to be put first into the water, and you may weaken the starch by pouring a little water upon it. Starch ought to be boiled in a copper vessel, because it requires much boiling, and tin is apt to make it burn. Some people mix their starch with allom, or gum arabic, nothing is so good as isinglass, and an ounce of it is sufficient to a quarter of the pound.

Amelia Chambers, The ladies best companion; or, a golden treasure for the fair sex (1775)

















via
In Elizabethan and Jacobean England, starch was sometimes mixed with other colours, to tint ruffs and collars according to fashion. (Cream lace, tinted with yellow, was in vogue for some of the 17th century.) Blue starch was out of favour for a time, after Queen Elizabeth banned its use in London in 1595, when extreme blue ruff fashion seems to have become associated with immorality, but soon the manufacture of "smalt or blue starch" was once again approved by Parliament as a means of setting "many poor people a-work", and it continued as a basic household essential for centuries.

Her Majesty's pleasure is that no blue starch shall be used or worn by any of her Majesty's subjects

CAN'T SLEEP, CLOWN WILL EAT ME

Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund vs Franklin Mint

Following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund was granted intellectual property rights over her image.[2] In 1998, after refusing the Franklin Mint an official license to produce Diana merchandise, the fund sued the company, accusing it of illegally selling Diana dolls, plates and jewellery.[3] In California, where the initial case was tried, a suit to preserve the right of publicity may be filed on behalf of a dead person, but only if that person is a Californian. The Memorial Fund therefore filed the lawsuit on behalf of the estate, and upon losing the case were counter sued by Franklin Mint in 2003. In November 2004, the case was settled out of court with the Diana Memorial Fund agreeing to pay £13.5 million (US $21.5 million) to charitable causes on which both sides agreed. In addition to this, the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund had spent a total of close to £4 million (US $6.5 million) in costs and fees relating to this litigation, and as a result froze grants allocated to a number of charities.[4]  wikipedia

dilution

analogue photography is a form of homeopathy?

Eikonoklaste, Eikon Basiliki and Idolatry

It is perhaps only a slight exaggeration to say that the English Civil War was fought over the issue of images, and not just the question of statues and other material symbols in religious ritual but less tangible matters such as the 'idol' of monarchy and, beyond that, "the idols of the mind" that Reformation thinkers sought to purge in themselves and others.
Mitchell/ Iconology/ 7























AlJazeera The Image War

War images / Iraq

Christopher Hill Milton & the English Revolution

Vilem Flusser / Television image and political space in the light of the Romanian Revolution

-->

--> April 7^th 1990 Kunsthalle, Budapest

I believe that whatever happened in Romania merits philosophical reflection. Of course it is too early, we do not have the necessary distance, but still something seems to have happened there, it is called here a revolution. I think that is a wrong term, because revolution is a political category and it doesn’t look to me that what happened over there is political at all. Now whatever happened there may, in the future be interpreted as a turning point. It may be that what French and American philosophers used to call post-history. Post-histoire has found its first, or almost first, expression in that small country, off Broadway if I may say so. Imagine for a moment, and this is why I accepted the invitation to come here to this meeting, imagine for an instant that such a thing should happen, let’s say in the United States or even in Western Europe. Imagine for an instant that television in the United States would take over and I think you would have imagined the end of history, the end of what we are used to call history. Now of course it happened all away in Romania, where nobody cares about, but imagine for a moment that it happens in what we are used to call the centres of decision, even in Moscow. I will submit to you the hypothesis that a new situation in the image culture is about to happen, but in order to sustain such an hypothesis I will have to give you a few theoretical concepts..

We have at least two possibilities to face our world. One is through image and another is through linear writing. Originally man was immersed in his circumstance. Now when Homo Sapiens came about he made a step back from this circumstance, what Heidegger calls ein Schritt zuruck, and he tries to look at the circumstance from a subjective distance and the result was an image. Now the image transforms the world into a scene. Through Image the world has a scenic character, it shows contexts, what Wittgenstein calls Sachverhalte, what Heidegger calls Verhältnisse. Bezüge. The world seen through imagination is a context wherein things relate to each other. Now this has a magical character. Every image is strongly magically loaded. When the first images were made, let’s say at Lascaux, they were meant to orient people in the world, for instance they were meant to show how to hunt oxen or ponies. And when people were exposed to these images they probably danced, they made ritual happenings. And then they went out to hunt the animal. It is absolutely impossible to see the image outside magic… there is a voodoo character in every image. I told you that the image had the purpose to orient people from outside in the world in which they are thrown. An image is the possibility for me to step out from the world and see it from outside. So they are sorts of maps, mediation or as you say here media, which is a barbarian way to use latin. So they are mediations, they mean the world. But by meaning the world they also hide it. This is an inner dialectics of every mediation.

For those who speak German it becomes very clear: Bilder verstellen was sie vorstellen, sie stellen sich vor dass was sie vorstellen sollen. Now this inner dialectics which is responsible for the fact that images hide the world, is the reason for a very profound alienation. Images are meant for people to orient themselves in the world, but when they become very strong, people use their experience in the world to orient themselves in the image. The image becomes the concrete reality and the world is only a pretext. Now this inversion of the relationship between the world of experience and the world of imagination, this is called by the prophets idolatry. This is the reason why Plato wanted to prohibit art and images in the Republic. Images are anti-republican, anti-political. The purpose of image in this stage is to hide what happens. When this idolatry, this curious sort of paganism, against which not only Jewish prophets, but also the pre-Socratic philosophers argued. When this became too dense linear writing was invented. The purpose of linear writing was to open up the images by explaining them and thus open up a vision of the experienced world. Now let me open up the difference between a scenic and a processual vision. In the scene things happen; everything is a happening. In the linear, processual world nothing happens; everything is an event. The difference between an happening and an event is that the happening is the result of chance, of accident. It is an accident which becomes necessary. ..

The world of happening is a chaotic world but everything repeats itself in that chaotic world. But in the event of history, in the vision of the world as a process, nothing ever repeats itself, everything is an event which has causes and will have effects. It is a world which can be rationally explained. To give you an example, for instance, the coronation of a king is a happening, it is the result of some accident, the old king dies, it happens all the time, Le Roi est mort. Vive le Roi and it is always something festive and magical. Now the discussion of the law in parliament is not a happening it is an event. It has causes and it will have effects and it is done in order to have effects. The consciousness which corresponds to image is called the magical, mythical consciousness. And the consciousness that corresponds to linear writing, to this processual vision is called political consciousness. Television cannot be like any other image, a political thing, it is anti-political by its very structure. And political consciousness is always directed against the image

Now as you know Western history begins with linear writing for the simple fact that before the invention of linear writing there was no history, there were no events, everything only happened. And with the invention of linear writing events were created, but of course images didn’t give up, as the linear writing advanced against images in order to explain them away, the images infiltrated themselves into the texts and they began to illustrate the texts. The dynamics of western civilization, this inattention within western civilization, the tremendously so explosive and so dangerous for other civilizations, is the fact that image and text, imagination and conceptual thinking, magic and politics are always in conflict with us. Now during most of Western history this was a very creative process, imagination became ever more conceptual, and conceptual thinking ever more imaginative. But with the invention of print, with Gutenberg, this changed. Images were eliminated from our culture; they were enclosed into glorified ghettoes called museums or academies and the situation was dominated by writing. The triumph of linear writing was the Enlightenment, C18, and this was also the moment of the most developed political thinking. But as rational thought, political and scientific thought advanced, its message became ever less and less imaginable. You can see that with science, that science projects a vision of the world that is perfectly conceivable but totally unimaginable. So that in the C19 the world is becoming less and less imaginable and this is the real reason why photography was invented. The political characteristic of linear writing before the invention of newspapers is that you write in private and then you publish in the open space. If you want to get the message you have to go in the open space, get the text and take it home in order to read it. Now these dialectics between private creation and publication, this is the dialectics of politics. Politics is the distinction between a private space and a public space, an οἶκος and an agora, a domus and a forum. Now this pendulum use- I go out from the private to the public space in order to get the information, I take the information from the public space and take it home in order to elaborate on it and store it away, this is the dynamics of political consciousness. Hegel used to call it the unhappy consciousness because he said, when I leave home to conquer the world I lose myself and when I go home in order to find myself again, I lose the world and this pendulum, is political consciousness and political consciousness is always unhappy, there can be no political paradise because political consciousness is an unhappy consciousness, every consciousness is unhappy, if you want to be happy it doesn’t help you to have consciousness, an earth worm I think is happy. Now if you take this into account, please consider what is happening to images. The images are no longer published, they are elaborated in a private place and they go directly to the other private place, the sender is private and the receiver is private and the public space has become unnecessary, redundant. There is no use for a forum any longer, because everything goes directly from the private place to the private place, where the public space, the political space used to lie now there are visible or invisible cables. Now I do not say that the same is not true of writing. Newspapers for instance are distributed through the private space even newspapers can be anti-political. ..The information revolution, the term is correct, the impact of the information revolution is that if you want to be informed you have to stay home, you go to the public space, you lose information. Now let me go back to photography. Photography was invented in order to render imaginable the events around us, not only the political events but also the scientific, the technological events. History advanced linearly, but photographs transcended history and they froze the events into happenings. They took the events out of their context they transcoded them into happenings and then they went back to history and they could be used as a sort of memory of history. Now this is called documentation. Images were used to document historical events. It wasn’t so easy. The problem of subjectivity came into it. Photography was invented to give an objective image, but since the camera is coded, it is even less objective than a painting, still the ideal was that there is history and then there is a photographer and he steps back from history into something which we might call mystical transcendence and out of this mystical transcendence a photograph.. there is a problem, the moment you step back from politics into image you can have no point of view. The political point of view is lost because the moment you get out from politics you can see that every event has many possible points of view, none of it is correct and what you can do is multiply points of view, you dance around the event, and the more you collect points of view the better is your image. So that a photographer who dances around event looking at the people with a camera, there are dancers they are Husserlian people, they try to be phenomenological, of course they can’t succeed, because you know image makers do not think, you know they cannot think. Thinking is anti-image. Now they dance around it, and by dancing, by collecting points of view, they destroy ideology – which is the insistence of one point of view- you hear political people speaking, they say my point of view is the right one, and yours is the wrong one, but if you listen to a photographer he will say every point of view is the same, the problem is how many points of view I can collect. All these ideas aside, the idea was that the image should document politics, but in the first half of the C20 and even stronger after the second war, this relationship began to change, all of a sudden politics was made in order to get into an image. The purpose of politics, and so far nobody knew the purpose of politics, progress is not a purpose, progress is a method, but where do we advance at? What do you mean we advance? We don’t know where. All of a sudden we discovered where. We advanced to an image. Everything wanted to be photographed and filmed and taken in a video. The purpose of everything, like a wedding, the purpose of marrying was to be photographed. The purpose of going on the moon was so that Mr. Nixon could appear on television and see how people walked on the moon. The purpose of Arab hijackers of airplanes was to be taken on television. So all of a sudden people discovered what politics is about, politics is aimed at being taken, aufgenommen, in an image. And this created a curious phenomenon, events began to accelerate, they roared toward the image, one event followed another, because every event wanted to be taken in an image. There were the people with the film cameras and there were the photographers and there were the people standing there with the video cameras and all history roared towards them and said please take me, please put me into the image. It is curious why should we do that? What happened in Romania, there is another inversion, if I am right it is the image which now causes the event. What I am saying is terribly frightening. I don’t know whether you share my..

I don’t know if we are aware when we speak about post-history, whether we are aware of the terror we are speaking about. Imagine magic. We saw yesterday and this morning, I think all of us don’t want to see the face of Mr. Ceaucescu ever again in our life. So what we saw the images yesterday and today was highly aesthetic

… it is the purpose of theatre, I think it was Lessing who said the purpose of theatre is Mitgleid und Furcht zu erwachen, to provoke sympathy and fright. So that happened. You ask whether those bodies are real or not which we saw, whether the water in Timișoara was really poisoned or not, that’s a bad metaphysical question .. the real experience is in the image, what happened behind the image is no use to us. Political reasoning is no longer valid. There is no reality behind the image. There are realities in the image. What is now happening in Romania cannot be history, it is something else. Political reasoning does not apply to it. It is the result of magic. It is a sort of technical voodoo. How can we judge it if we do not have the criteria for it? We do not have a philosophy of post-history. We do not yet have a philosophy of an image in power.

Vilém Flusser -- Television Image and Political Space in the Light of the Romanian Revolution

laws against images / patterns and licences 1563

For as much as through the natural desire that all sorts of subjects and people both noble and mean, have to procure the Portrait and Picture of the Queen's Majestie, great nomber of Painters, and some Printers and Gravers, have already, and do dayly attempt to make in divers maners portaietures of her Majestie, in paynting, graving, and prynting, wherein is evidently shewn that hytherto none hath sufficiently expressed the naturall representation of her Majestie's person, favour, or garce, but for the most part have also erred therein, as thereof dayly complaints are made amongst her Majestie's loving subjects, in so much that for redress hereof hir Majestie hath lately bene so instantly and so importunately sued unto by the Lords of hir Consell and others of her Nobility, in respect of the great disorder herein used, not only to be content taht some speciall coning payntor might be permitted by access to hir Majestie to take the naturall representation of hir Majestie, whereof she hath bene allweise of hir own right disposition very unwylling, but also to prohibit all manner of other persons to draw, paynt, grave, or pourtrayit her Majestie's personage or visage for a tyme, untill by some perfect patron [pattern] and example the same may be by others followed. Therefor hir Majestie being herein as it were overcome with the contynuall requests of so many of her Nobility and Lords, whom she cannot deny, is plaesed that for their contentations, some coning person, mete therefor, shall shortly make a pourtraict of her person or visage to be participated to otheres for satisfaction of hir loving subjects, and furtdermore commandeth all manner of persons in the mean tyme to forbear from paynting, graving, printing, or making of any pourtraict of hir Majestie, until some speciall person that shall be by hir allowed shall have first finished a pourtraicture thereof, after which fynished hir Majestie will be content that all other painters, printers, or gravers, that shall be known men of understanding, and so thereto licensed by the hed officers of the plaices where they shall dwell [as reason it is that every person should not without consideration attempt the same], shall and may at their pleasures follow the said patron or first portriature. And for that hir Majestie perceiveth that a grete nombre of her loving subjects are much greved and take offence with the errors and deformities allredy committed by sundry persons in this behalf, she straitly chargeth all hir officesr and ministers to see to the due observation hereof, and as soon as may be to reform the errors already committed and in the mean tyme to forbyyd and prohibit the shewing or publication of such as are apparently deformed, until they may be reformed which are reformable.

The progresses and public processions of Queen Elizabeth / John Nichols / on authority of Strype

laws against images

Two curious documents concerning the office in the first
reign are known. One is a draft proclamation assigned to
the year 1563, to forbid all painters and gravers from
drawing the picture of the Queen, till some cunning
person meet therefor shall make a natural representation
of her Majesty's person as a pattern lor other
persons to copy. 3 The other is a licence granted to

' our welbeloved subjecte George Gower our Sargeant Paynter
. . . we do give & graunte. . the full sole & lawfull
priviledge . . that he shall by himself his deputy & deputies
assignee & assignees only, & none other . . . from henceforth
. . . make or cause to be made all & all maner of purtraictes
& pictures of our person ... in oyle cullers upon bourdes or
canvas or to grave the same on copper . . . [for his life we
appoint] George Gower our officer, maker, paynter, ... & doe
strictly forbydd & prohibit ... all & every other persone or
persons whatsoever, Englishmen or straingers
... to entermeddle with the making, painting,
or pryntinge . . . excepting only one, Nichas Hilliard. . . .' 4

laws against images / post no bills

These images of a day or an hour, bleached by the elements, charcoaled by urchins, scorched by the sun - although others are sometimes collected even before they have dried - symbolize to a higher degree even than the newspapers the sudden, shock-filled, multiform life that carries us away.

Maurice Talmeyr, La Cite du sang Paris 1901 p269

In the early days of the poster there was as yet no law to regulate the posting of bills or to provide protection for posters and indeed from posters: so one could wake up some morning to find one's window placarded.

Benjamin Arcades [B2,1]

laws against images

Reproduction in printed media:
A banknote may be reproduced if the following criteria are met:
Condition 1 - Reproductions are one-sided only (nothing should appear on the reverse of the reproduction which might give the impression that the reproduction is a genuine banknote).
Condition 2 - Reproductions are not the same size as the actual banknotes: if they are smaller, they must be at most two-thirds as long and at most two-thirds as wide; if they are larger, they must be at least one and a half times as long and at least one and a half times as wide. Reproductions of parts of banknotes must meet the same conditions.
Condition 3 - Reproductions are not shown in an offensive context, for example in conjunction with imagery or text of a violent or pornographic nature.
Condition 4 - There is no distortion of the Queen’s image (apart from an enlargement, reduction or slant).
Condition 5 - At least one of the following criteria is also met:
the reproduction of the banknote is shown on the slant and not flat to camera – in such cases, the distortion must be such that right angles are reduced to acute angles of 70° or less, or increased to obtuse angles of 110° or more;
the reproduction is printed on a material clearly different and distinguishable from paper or paper-like material;
the colours on the reproduction differ distinctly from the main colours used on any of the current series of Bank of England banknotes;
in the case of partial reproductions, no more than 50% of the total surface area of one side of the original banknote is reproduced;
if the reproduction is flat to camera, it must be overprinted with the word “SPECIMEN” twice in accordance with Condition 6 (see “Reproduction in electronic media”).


Reproduction in electronic media:
A banknote may be reproduced if Conditions 3 and 4 (see “Reproduction in printed media”) and 6 (see below) are met:
Condition 6 - The reproduction includes the word “SPECIMEN” twice in solid black capital letters: once from the bottom left corner to the top centre and once from the bottom centre to the top right corner – the length of the word “SPECIMEN” must not be less than one-third of the length of the reproduction and the height of the characters must not be less than one-eighth of the height of the reproduction. This applies to both complete and partial reproductions.

The Discrete Image

The image in general does not exist.

image-object
anima
cinema

Thomas / Blow Up
the conditions of belief / evidence

l'écran
l'écrit

laws against images

the Privy Council in 1596 ordered all public officers to assist the Queen's Serjeant Painter in finding and destroying 'unseemly' portraits.

Laws Against Images

It was a severe disappointment, Beyle writes, when some years ago, looking through old papers, he came across an engraving entitled Prospetto d'Ivrea and was obliged to concede that his recollected picture of the town in the evening sun was nothing but a copy of that very engraving. This being so, Beyle's advice is not to purchase engravings of fine views and prospects seen on one's travels, since before very long they will displace our memories completely, indeed one might say they destroy them. For instance he could no longer recall the wonderful Sistine Madonna he had seen in Dresden, try as he might, because Muller's engraving of it had become superimposed in his mind; the wretched pastels by Mengs in the same gallery, on the other hand, of which he had never seen a copy, remained before him as clear as when he first saw them.

Sebald, Vertigo























The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.

Benjamin

laws against images: iconoclasm

Where is set down what we did.

william dowsing

Hic locus est domus Dei, nil aliud, & porta coeli

John Weever in 1631:

‘the images of the defunct were broken, erased, cut, or dismembered, Inscriptions or Epitaphs, especially if they began with ‘Orate pro anima,’[Pray for the soul] or concluded with ‘Cuius animae propitietur Deus.’ [ may God atone your soul.....] For greedinesse of the brasse, or for that they were thought to bee Antichristian, pulled out from the sepulchres and purloined, and dead carcases for gaine of stone and leaden coffins cast out of their graves.’

February 21st 1548

Order of the Privy Council for the Removal of Images