The Serial Image

Photography arrives in the long nineteenth century, introducing the eternal repetition of gesture and medium, the industrial dimension of mass-produced object images. Thus not only was the first potentially infinite technical reproducibility of a visual fragment, impression of light, unique and synthetic glance, but also the first visual link of a linear or mosaic narrative series, a sequence of images capable of telling stories by flanking, supplementing, or replacing text and reaching an audience that is at first bourgeois, then increasingly broader, scattered in different geographical and social contexts. The essay succinctly reconstructs some of the technological and social transitions that transformed photography into a “characterizing” medium, capable of transforming the media ecosystem at the end of the century and shaping the seriality of newspapers, the novel, illustration, pictorial and visual representation, and early cinematography.