Describe.
Where, when and how fast? How?
Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel
Describing visual epidemics may seem easy.
It would be enough, having identified a corpus of viral images, to have the dates and places of their circulation in order to map this diffusion. We could then study their spatio-temporal evolution.
However, we who have been confronting the question for several years, first on the worldwide circulation of works of art, then on the worldwide circulation of printed images, have noticed that the task is difficult.
First difficulty,
the amount
Describing the world circulation of images is quite easy on a case by case basis.
Taking an image, one can indeed map and highlight its successive circulations quite easily - by numbering the stages of its trajectory, or by animating several successive maps that would show, in film, the successive places where the image has been published or seen. If the list of circulations in question is never exhaustive nor sufficient, it indicates however a minimal diffusion, from which we can draw other threads, starting from other sources.
Our machines, for example, identify about twenty occurrences of Olympia by Edouard Manet. The list of occurrences, arranged in chronological order, indicates quite clearly the logic that a map would not say as well..
| Date | Ville | Périodique |
| 1890-01-01 | Paris | L' art français: revue artistique hebdomadaire |
| 1897-01-01 | Paris | La Revue blanche (Paris. 1891) |
| 1905-07-01 | Paris | Les Arts de la vie |
| 1917-01-01 | Munich | Jugend |
| 1917-01-01 | Munich | Jugend |
| 1917-01-01 | Munich | Jugend |
| 1917-01-01 | Munich | Jugend |
| 1917-01-01 | Munich | Jugend |
| 1919-01-01 | Leipzig | Der Cicerone |
| 1921-05-15 | Paris | Le Bulletin de la vie artistique |
| 1926-05-01 | Paris | Le Bulletin de la vie artistique |
| 1927-01-01 | Paris | L'Amour de l'art (1920) |
| 1928-01-01 | Stuttgart | Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration |
| 1929-03-06 | Paris | Le Gaulois artistique (Paris) |
| 1932-01-01 | Paris | L'Amour de l'art (1920) |
| 1932-01-01 | Paris | Cahiers d'art (Paris) |
| 1933-01-01 | Paris | Gazette des beaux-arts (Paris. 1859) |
| 1945-01-01 | Paris | Gazette des beaux-arts (Paris. 1859) |
| 1945-01-01 | Paris | Gazette des beaux-arts (Paris. 1859) |
| 1965-01-01 | Warsaw | Rocznik Historii Sztuki |
| 1985-01-01 | Warsaw | Biuletyn historii sztuki |
| 1988-09-01 | Buenos Aires | Babel. Revista de Libros |
The illustrated circulation of Olympia, is proven since the beginning of our corpus (which focuses on the post-1890 period, therefore cannot report the reproductions of Olympia before 1890). It is rather French at the beginning. Then it became international.
The diffusion of the image concerns in our corpus primarily art magazines. In 1890, the painting was reproduced to illustrate an article on its entry into the Luxembourg, the museum devoted to living artists at the time, in the weekly magazine L'Art français (n°186, Saturday 15 November 1890). Manet's painting was then considered a jewel of French national art. The writer of the article did not seem to remember or know that Olympia had caused great controversies in the 1860s.
A generation later, in 1917, the painting illustrated the advertisement for a recent book on the history of modern art in the German magazine Jugend. Olympia is now an icon, representative of all modern art. And this, despite the Franco-German conflict. Would the image by circulating be denationalized?
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"Just published, from brand new points of reference, causes a sensation. The history of art in the 19th century by the famous Munich university professor and art historian Fritz Burger. An introduction to modern art. Brilliantly illustrated with 149 pictures, mostly large, printed in double tone, and partly four-color plates" (Jugend, no. 43, 1917, p. 846a).
Even if one apprehends this circulation of an image in more detail, one does not say much about epidemic logics.
Each image has good reasons to appear here or there - in one case to illustrate an article, in the other to summarize an idea (modern art), for the look (a naked woman, in general, it does not pass unnoticed). But we are far from reaching epidemic logics.
When the images are numerous, how to locate general logics of visual circulation? One must be able to reason on a quantitative scale, - but not by adding up cartographies and chronologies. One must construct homogeneous series of images whose circulation may correspond to the same viral phenomenon.
This is the second issue: Which batches of images should be isolated to track mass viralities? Related problem: a diffuse type of image (for example, the image of the automobile) is not always proof that the image is circulating.
The image can be only the corollary visualization of another phenomenon which it diffuses (for example the practice of the automobile publicity).
As the Visual Contagions project team becomes more familiar with its corpus, it chooses which groups of images can be studied epidemiologically.
For the moment, we plan to describe several types of visual contagions:
1/ that of art images
- by apprehending them in the collective, because they allow us to apprehend the famous question of centers and peripheries, and to observe if there was really a stronger Parisian influence before 1945, or a greater New York importance after the Second World War.
2/ Those of the advertising images
- even if they do not directly testify to visual circulations, since it is possible that these images have rather revealed the adoption here and there of common practices (buying a gramophone, an automobile, a typewriter...) and even before that, the adoption of similar advertising practices.
3/ Those of the images of mankind
- by being interested in the spatiotemporal logics of diffusion of the photographs of busts, which can testify to the past evolutions of the material representation of the man and the woman, in link with socio-cultural logics that it will also be a question of establishing..
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Spatio-temporal circulation of the images of the busts in the Visual Contagions Corpus.
One can also decide to choose nothing, and to let the mass speak to make emerge a world space-time of the circulation of the images.
Read Nore :
1. Characterize. Is a circulation of images necessarily epidemic?
2. Describe. Where, when and how fast? How?
3. Explain. Are there laws of imitation for images?
4. Experiment.
Chapter