Reproduction

John Paul II, waxing Frankfurtian and Benjaminist, reflects on the effects of technologies that enable us to reproduce images of the human body – film and photography ( Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology Of The Body , 366-7 ):

“Artistic reproduction, when it becomes the content of representation and transmission (television or cinema), loses in some way its fundamental contact with man/body, whose reproduction it is, and very often becomes an ‘anonymous’ object such as, for example, an anonymous photographic nude published in an illustrated magazine, or an image spread to TV screens all over the world. Such anonymity is the effect of the ‘spreading’ of the image – reproduction of the human body, objectified first with the help of technologies of reproduction, which seems . . . to be essentially different from the transfiguration of a model typical of a work of art, above all in the figurative arts. Such anonymity . . . constitutes a specific problem from the point of view of the ethos of the human body in works of culture, particularly in contemporary works of so-called mass culture.”