Images, So Easy to Manipulate, Lose Value : Media: When advertisers use footage of Bogey to flog diet soda, we know we’ve been had.

Los Angeles, among its other geniuses of place, sets our culture’s visual tone. It started, you might say, with “Hollywood,” the figurative designation for the movie industry. Thomas Edison’s first patent on the kinetoscope was filed 100 years ago this March from New Jersey. But movies quickly came to Southern California for the daylight and the varied terrain--and to dodge Edison’s militia of patent enforcers.

The movies taught us to admire the image. It was huge and we were in the dark, looking up at it. It could be argued that no one will replace Gable and Dietrich, or even Elvis and Marilyn, in star stature because no one will ever again first reach us, literally, on that scale. The sheer hugeness of the movie image etched something indelible on us.

When Lucille Ball set up her television industry in Hollywood, nearly half a century ago, bringing electronic mass-image production to the West Coast for the first time, a change in our relation to the image took place. No longer “the King,” now someone we thought of as just like us held our attention. Sitcom images tended to look like the living rooms that we watched them in. In “The Honeymooners” and “I Love Lucy,” the image came down to eye level. Sitcoms offered the middle class its own fun-house mirror.

Now, true to a seeming 50-year-cycle, our culture’s relation to imagery has changed again, and again it started in L.A. County, where members of the Foothill Division of the Los Angeles Police Department were taped in the act of beating Rodney King. In 1992, the verdict in that case--quite apart from its disastrous social consequences--announced to the avidly watching world that we no longer believe what we see.

A new skepticism infused our relation to the image all year long. Everywhere we looked, we were instructed not to believe what we saw. Could that really be Cary Grant and James Cagney and Louis Armstrong performing with Paula Abdul in those Diet Coke ads? Of course not! Everyone knew that those were merely their images, digitally ripped from their context. This is akin to grave-robbing, in a sense, for when did Bogey ever agree to sell soda? A new type of visual servitude has emerged in which one’s image “lives on” as a slave to whoever may claim to “own” it. From the Michael Jackson video in which one person’s face “morphed”--that is, seemed to blend organically by computer interpolation--through all the major races and genders, to Madonna’s book of photographs that did not (as she explained to MTV) depict real events or desires, but merely fantasies, photography in 1992 declared itself staged, while special effects (like slo-mo in the Simi Valley courthouse) stretched reality on a distorting rack.

Images are losing esteem everywhere, and why? Because we have more control over them than ever. Just as with computers and video cameras, so with all the other tools of image production and manipulation: First the military gets it; then the entertainment industry uses it to make images for the mass audience; and then it shows up for sale at the mall, enabling consumers to make and manipulate images for themselves.

Right now, the boundaries between the video and home computer categories are evaporating fast. But the key changes began with the cable channel explosion, the infrared remote control and the VCR: The couch potato has become a TV producer.

The plummeting value of the image thus reverses the traditional scale summed up by the proverb, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Think of TV, its screen freshly painted by an electron stream 30 times a second. How many thousand pictures are now worth a word?

We must retrieve the integrity of images by coping with their abundance, for abundance wrecks the value of any currency, be it diamonds, cash or pictures. What we need is “visual literacy”--a critical awareness of what we’re watching, on a case-by-case basis, to sort the counterfeit from the correct and to tell what’s worth nothing from what’s worth noting. Then at least some images will reclaim our respect and regain their value.