The Age of Light

In Man Ray’s piece, “The Age of Light,” I found a lot of what he said to be quite reasonable. “All progress results from an intense individual desire to improve the immediate present, from an all-conscious sense of material insufficiency” (167). How it relates to photography I will get to, but I feel it is pretty accurate that progress, whether it is in our own lives, or technologically comes around when we absolutely need it. Procrastination relates to this. Although some of the technology we have now is not absolutely necessary, it still stems from this intense desire to improve our material standard. The iphone, even having internet at all on a cell phone, lap tops with a thousand applications—all of these things probably started by someone thinking the current modes of technology were insufficient. I might have to amend my statement that new technology comes around when we need it, but I still definitely agree with Ray’s original statement. So comes photography into the play of new technologies. He asks, “For what can be more binding amongst beings than the discovery of a common desire?” Photography probably did do a great deal in bringing people together, once it was accessible to everyone. Not only did it bring the world in by allowing images from Asia reach the New World, but it allowed everyone (once it was made affordable) this luxury of taking and enjoying photos.
Ray goes on to say (in my interpretation) that photographs capture people’s extremely candid experiences/expressions and we can relate to these on a remarkably personal level. We can see photographs of “…an image that has tragically survived an experience.” This is an interesting point. Everyday we have the opportunity to see photographs of horrible events in which the people in the photo died. In a way we are grateful to be able to learn and appreciate our own good fortune. But on the other hand it is almost an unfair advantage on our part. I believe it was an important technological and social step to invent photography because we need to be able to see these tragedies specifically to learn from them. There are still people who deny the Holocaust existed, and without photography it may have been much harder to prove.
This reading was a bit challenging to understand but those are some things I got out of it. I feel like the underlying meaning is that desire impels us to do things, create things, say things, and is the ultimate driving force behind the modern world.