The Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture Pages 183-200

        In this section of the book it talks all about visual technologies, image reproduction and copies. The term reproduction is defined not in the ways we think it might be; it is used to describe the ways that cultural practices and their forms of expression reproduce the ideologies and interests of the ruling class and the reproduction of ideology through media also reproduced the political order and its episteme. Technology has always been evolving over time, but what many overlook is that it has important and influential effects on society. Technology has a weird way of popping up when it is needed. Usually some one has a problem and then as more and more people have the same problem, someone eventually invents some way to solve that problem, usually with some kind of new and evolving technology. Photography emerged as a popular medium, not simply because it was invented, but because "it fulfilled particular social demands of the early nineteenth century" (pg. 184). From photography evolving, like all technology does, the world was introduced to image reproduction or the copy. Different things can be copied in different ways, but now when it comes to the image and the mass reproduction, it is much harder to tell which is a copy and which is an original. Not only is it hard to tell images apart, but also many kinds of artwork today. "Reproducibility as a quality of the medium moved the artwork out from the centuries-long emphasis on uniqueness and authenticity as the qualities that confer value to it" (pg. 195). The authenticity of an image or artwork is valued above all else and because of this it has become the center of all things. Our society values authenticity with just about everything, people, clothes, brands, images, artwork, icons, etc. A copy's value does not lie in its uniqueness, but in its aesthetic, cultural, and social worth throughout the world.