Prior to photography, __________. While painters have always lifted particular places out of their ‘dwelling’ and transported them elsewhere, paintings were time-consuming to produce, relatively difficult to transport and one-of-a-kind. The multiplication of photographs especially took place with the introduction of the half-tone plate in the 1880s that made possible the mechanical reproduction of photographs in newspapers, periodicals, books and advertisements. Photography became coupled to consumer capitalism and the globe was now offered ‘in limitless quantities, figures, landscapes, events which had not previously been utilised either at all, or only as pictures for one customer’. With capitalism’s arrangement of the world as a ‘department store’, ‘the proliferation and circulation of representations ... achieved a spectacular and virtually inescapable global magnitude’. Gradually photographs became cheap mass-produced objects that made the world visible, aesthetic and desirable. Experiences were ‘democratised’ by translating them into cheap images. Light, small and mass-produced photographs became dynamic vehicles for the spatiotemporal circulation of places.

* proliferation: 확산 ** magnitude: (큰) 규모 *** aesthetic: 미적인