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Pictures of perfection

Dec 23rd 1999

From The Economist print edition

FEW tinyacorns have grown into mightieroaks than the one planted in 1839 by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre. Before that date, images could be created only by the human hand, based on what the human eye perceived. Daguerre’s pictures, the first practical photographs, captured images of the world directly.

值得注意第一句话，比喻手法，吸引人

【Few too would be the changes in everyday life more likely to disturb a visitor from the 11th century. It is easy to overlook the ubiquity of images in the modern world. But photography, its daughter cinematography, and its stepchild television, have wrought an alteration in the visual environment that is more profound than any other in history. A millennium ago, ordinary men or women would scarcely have seen a graphic representation of the world. Even churches (at least, those in Western Europe), were generally decorated with abstract rather than naturalistic art. Now, images are everywhere. And they are idolised in a way that might give even a hardened atheist cause to wonder whether the Second Commandment does, perhaps, give good advice:

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.】1，这个讲发展背景

【Daguerre’s invention relied on the observation that a chemical called silver iodide is unstable in the presence of light. It decomposes to leave metallic silver behind. By exposing a surface impregnated with it to an image formed by a lens, the image can be “captured”. Others had noticed this, but their images faded, because the unaffected silver iodide also eventually disintegrated in the ambient light. Daguerre worked out how to wash away the unaltered iodide after exposure, in order to “fix” the image.

Daguerre’s first photographs were made on copper plates. After exposure, these were treated with mercury vapour, to form a shiny amalgam from the deposited silver, and then with a solution of salt, to fix the image. Salt was soon replaced by sodium thiosulphate (then known as hyposulphite), which is still used, under the colloquial name of “hypo”, to this day.】2，这一部分则是早期印版照相的发明及原理

【Photography boomed in the wake of Daguerre’s invention. Paul Delaroche, an artist contemporary with him, suggested, when he first saw a daguerrotype, that “from today, painting is dead”. Cynical observers of modern art might be inclined to agree with him.

But it was when the images started to move in 1895, courtesy of the aptly named Lumière brothers, that modern idolatry really began. Adding the third dimension of time to two-dimensional pictures gave them unprecedented verisimilitude. Viewers began to identify with what and whom they saw, in a surprisingly personal way. Thus was the film star born.】3，相关的发展

No one has yet cracked the problem of giving images all four dimensions. Cinematography still lacks depth. Holography, an invention developed in the 1960s, provides that missing depth, but does not yet move. Nevertheless, as the icons pour in their billions from the world’s image factories, it seems that the medium truly is the message. And the message is: the graven image has won.

作者分析的思路很明确，历史背景→起源→相关的发展

Copyright © 2008 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

粉红-好句好词
橙色-不知道的
红色-GRE
蓝色-想法和分析
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每次编辑都抽风。。。。。不弄了