A dictionary of Marshall McLuhanβs quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
Β©2026 Marshall McLuhan Estate
Your search term is Photography. Scroll down for the results!
π Search Within Selection
Photography is being viewed as a chapter. Search for all appearances
Viewing chapter Photography (34 quotes)
Perhaps the great revolution produced by photograph was in the traditional arts. The painter could no longer depict a world that had been much photographed. He turned, instead, to reveal the inner process of creativity in expressionism and in abstract art. Likewise, the novelist could no longer describe objects or happenings for readers who already knew what was happening by photo, press, film, and radio.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 194
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Matching and Making
Both monocle and camera tend to turn people into things, and the photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise. The movie stars and matinee idols are put into the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy. They can be bought and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 189
Year: 1964
However, to say that "the camera cannot lie" is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name. Indeed, the world of the movie that was prepared by the photograph has become synonymous with illusion and fantasy, turning society into what Joyce called an "allnights newsery reel", that substitutes a "reel" world for reality. Joyce knew more about the effects of the photograph on our senses, our language, and our thought processes than anybody else. His verdict on the "automatic writing" that is photography was the abnihilization of the etym. He saw the photo as at least a rival, and perhaps a usurper, of the word, whether written or spoken.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, pp 192-193
Year: 1964
As someone said in beginning a study of photography, nobody can commit photography alone. This is true of English, or any other mass mediumβ
Press (Chart), in NAEB Report on Understanding New Media, June (1960), p 76
Year: 1960
By conferring a means of self delineation of objects, of " statement without syntax," photography gave the impetus to a delineation of the inner world. Statement without syntax or verbalization was really statement by gesture, by mime, and by gestalt. This new dimension opened for human inspection by poets like Baudelaire and Rimbaud le paysage intΓ©rieur, or the countries of the mind.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 201
Year: 1964
Chapters:
After Language | Body Language
A press photo of battered players in a 1905 game between Pennsylvania and Swarthmore came to the attention of President Teddy Roosevelt. He was so angered at the picture of Swarthmore's mangled Bob Maxwell that he issued an immediate ultimatumβthat if rough play continued, he would abolish the game by executive edict. The effect was the same as that of the harrowing telegraph reports of Russell f r o m the Crimea, which created the image and role of Florence Nightingale.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 200
Year: 1964
" Conspicuous consumption" owed less to the phrase of Veblen than to the press photographer, who began to invade the entertainment spots of the very rich. The sights of men ordering drinks f r o m horseback at the bars of clubs quickly caused a public revulsion that drove the rich into the ways of timid mediocrity and obscurity in America, which they have never abandoned. The photograph made it quite unsafe to come out and play, for it betrayed such blatant dimensions of power as to be self-defeating.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, pp 200-201
Year: 1964
Drawn to McLuhan #11
A photograph of "St. Peter's at a Moment of History" was the cover feature of Life magazine for June 14, 1963. It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photo that it isolates single moments in time. The TV camera does not. The continuous scanning action of the TV camera provides, not the isolated moment or aspect, but the contour, the iconic profile and the transparency. Egyptian art, like primitive sculpture today, provided the significant outline that had nothing to do with a moment in time. Sculpture tends toward the timeless.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 188
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Sculpture, Sculptural
If color photography has created "museums without walls," how much more has electric lighting created space without walls, and day without night. Whether in the night city, the night highway, or the night ball game, sketching and writing with light have moved from the domain of the pictorial photograph to the live, dynamic spaces created by out-of-door lighting.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 128
Year: 1964
Awareness of the transforming power of the photo is often embodied in popular stories like the one about the admiring friend who said, "My , that's a fine child you have there!" Mother : "Oh, that's nothing. You should see his photograph.β
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 188
Year: 1964
Moreover, the photograph has reversed the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 197
Year: 1964
Such extensions of our faculties have immediate effects on our habits of perception. This is called βnegative feedback,β or learned responses to new situations. The photograph revolutionized the human image as much as it changed the patterns and spaces of our cities. Indeed, the photograph gave us a push in the direction of the programmed environment.
βThe Emperorβs Old Clothesβ (1966), p 92, reprinted in McLuhan Unbound #20 (2017), p 7
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Perception
The photograph revolutionized the human image as much as it changed the patterns and spaces of our cities. Indeed, the photograph gave man a push in the direction of the programmed environment.
βThe Emperorβs New Clothesβ (1966), p 92 reprinted in Essential McLuhan (1995), p 287
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Perception
The first market effect of the photo was to give new intensity of presence and conspicuousness. The new effect was to relate the consumer directly to the product⦠So that whereas the public had once been spectators of the rich consuming conspicuously, the public now became aware of the ordinary man in the at of consuming.
βConspicuous Co-Existenceβ (1957), p 2
Year: 1957
It is one of the peculiar characteristics of the photograph that it isolates single moments in time.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 188
Year: 1964
But mimicry is a major means of recognition. It is the βdouble takeοΏ½οΏ½ that startles us out of complacent inattention. Photography has been one of the major means that compelled men to examine their environment critically.
Untitled contribution, To Everything There Is a Season (1967), p 312
Year: 1967
β¦having begun as a repetition or formal βparodyβ of the outer world, photography has now reached the stage of revealing structure and formal constitution. A similar evolution has occurred in our understanding of the animal world. The nineteenth century zoo had been a space that contained captive animals. The twentieth century zooβ¦.they now study [the animals] as creating their own kinds of space as βterritoriality.β
Untitled contribution, To Everything There Is a Season (1967), p 312
Year: 1967
Positively, the effect of speeding up temporal sequence is to abolish time, much as the telegraph and cable abolished space. Of course the photograph does both. It wipes out our national frontiers and cultural barriers, and involves us in The Family of Man, regardless of any particular point of view.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 196
Year: 1964
The photograph as an extension of the visual power has the strange property of being a form of statement without syntax. The woodcuts and engravings that preceded the photo were highly syntactical. So is the movie that succeeded the photograph. The syntax of the engraving was from the hand. The syntax of the movie is from the foot. The movie, physiologically, is the union of the eye and the foot.
βA Phantom City Phakedβ (1964), pp 4-5
Year: 1964
It was the photograph that revealed the secret of bird-flight and enabled man to take off. The photo, in arresting bird-flight, showed that it was based on a principle of wing fixity. Wing movement was seen to be for propulsion, not for flight.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 194
Year: 1964
Just as the painter Samuel Morse had unintentionally projected himself into the nonvisual world of the telegraph, so the photograph really transcends the pictorial by capturing the inner gestures and postures of both body and mind, yielding the new worlds of endocrinology and psychopathology.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 202
Year: 1964
A century ago the British craze for the monocle gave to the wearer the power of the camera to fix people in a superior stare, as if they were objects. Eric von Stroheim did a great job with the monocle in creating the haughty Prussian officer. Both monocle and camera tend to turn people into things, and the photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise. The movie stars and matinee idols are put in the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy. They can be bought and hugged and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes. Mass-produced merchandise has always made some people uneasy in its prostitute aspect. Jean Genet's The Balcony is a play on this theme of society as a brothel environed by violence and horror. The avid desire of mankind to prostitute itself stands up against the chaos of revolution. The brothel remains firm and permanent amidst the most furious changes. In a word, photography has inspired Genet with the theme of the world since photography as a Brothel -without- Walls.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 189
Year: 1964
In the photographic age, fashions have come to be like the collage style in painting.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 189
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Fashion
By the same token, the complete transformation of human sense-awareness by this form [the photograph] of self-consciousness that alters facial expression and cosmetic makeup as immediately as it does our bodily stance, in public or in private.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 197
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Planet, Nature
People are nowadays much concerned to set their houses in order, a process of self-consciousness that has received large impetus from photography.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 192
Year: 1964
One immense area of photographic influence that affects our lives is the world of packaging and display and, in general, the organization of shops and stores of every kind.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 200
Year: 1964
Pornography, then, is specialism in sex. You take one small aspect of it and push it up to high intensity. The same with emotions, any sort of emotion. Like in the newspaper where you see the grief of a mother photographed. This is ghastly and indecent, because you have the whole situation torn apart and just one little aspect pushed up to high intensity.
βLove,β interview with Saturday Night magazine, February, 1967, p 26
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Specialism
The photograph has reversed the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 197
Year: 1964
The photograph revolutionized the human image as much as it changed the patterns and spaces of our cities.
βThe Emperor's Old Clothesβ, in Gyorgy Kepes, ed., The Man Made Object (1966), p 92
Year: 1966
Chapter:
Perception
Why non-literate societies cannot see films or photos without much training.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 36
Year: 1962
Nobody can commit photography alone. It is possible to have at least the illusion of reading and writing in isolation, but photography does not foster such attitudes.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 189
Year: 1964
While environments as such have a strange power to elude perception, the preceding ones acquire an almost nostalgic fascination when surrounded by the new. This is nowhere more evident than in the art of photography to invest all human artifacts with the quality of art. This is not mere power of reproduction but a making-new.
Contribution, To Everything There Is a Season (1967), p 312
Year: 1967
Chapter:
Extension Theory
Newspaper photography appeared and gave to the rich a degree of conspicuousness such as nobody had dreamed of before. After 1910 the rich decided that conspicuous consumption was for the birds. They withdrew. They dressed and lived modestly⦠but the news photo was a piece of technology which took hold of marketing and consumption and gave them a degree of conspicuousness which was revolutionary.
βConspicuous Co-existenceβ (1957), pp 1-2
Year: 1957
By the same token, the complete transformation of human sense-awareness by this form [photographs] involves a development of self-consciousness that alters facial expression and cosmetic makeup as immediately as it does our bodily stance, in public or in private.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge, p 197
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Planet, Nature