Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/06868_Field_TCUM T433.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 937b | 16 lines

discovered how to make visual reports without syntax.

     It was in 1839 that William Henry Fox Talbot read a paper
to the Royal Society which had as title: “Some account of the
Art of Photogenic Drawing, or the process by which Natural
Objects may be made to delineate themselves without the aid
of the artist’s pencil.” He was quite aware of photography as a
kind of automation that eliminated the syntactical procedures
of pen and pencil. He was probably less aware that he had
brought the pictorial world into line with the new industrial
procedures. For photography mirrored the external world
automatically, yielding an exactly repeatable visual image. It
was this all-important quality of uniformity and repeatability
that had made the Gutenberg break between the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance. Photography was almost as decisive in
making the break between mere mechanical industrialism and