When we talk about what media are and what the reality is, we will be easily confused and lost in a loop filled with glasses, mirrors, and lenses, which can transparently show real life images, reflect or distort the visible and invisibles, as well as recreate newly generated pictures at the same time. We are living in a world that constructed by multiply layers of seeing, various forms of mediated images, different levels of filtered repetition, reproduction and representation.
Technical development in photography makes it possible for people to enlarge a detail, to pause a motion, and to deconstruct a still image. We have thousands of methods and reasons to photograph a photograph. We make pictures of pictures every day in our life. Rephotographed fragments can be found everywhere in reality as well as in media. The fundamental signification implicit in the use of rephotograph technique is that there is an emphasis placed upon the materiality and processes of photography as media/medium.
Photography with its capability in rephotographing/reproduction is only one part of the big loop of contemporary media practice. Charlie Gere's argument on what today's media are is quite supportive, that is media are the production and product of digitalized endless repetition. Media are working like a big archive of represented, mediated, and filtered life-images and reality pieces. We are a part of the repetition and reproduction. We are so close to the rephotographed fragments, but somehow so remote from reality itself.
Indeed, it seems not only elementary but also essential that an inquiry into the nature of photographic representation is actually enriched through an a priori acceptance of the photographer's alienation from their subject. And it is alienation, which begins within the lens itself, for Lacan, implicit to the imposition of language, the fundamental consequence of the subject's entry into the Symbolic Order. We struggle to convey intimacy in language: it is already pulverized. We can only get to the real feeling through the artificial. Same thing happens in today's media age. We struggle to reveal the secret of life, the mysterious sacredness of reality; however the reality is already pulverized, separated, distorted into millions of layers, pieces, and various dimensions of images. We can now only try to get the sense of reality through the media world that built with repetition, representation and reflection.
"Rephotography may be conceptualized/recognized as a useful means with which to emphasize the fundamentally mediated quality of subjectivity itself." The more we want to know about the reality itself, the more repetition we make to get a sense of the original. We are in such a dilemma that we have to use the repetition/artificial as an entry way for understanding something, however making us even further away from the true materiality/objectivity itself.
This phenomenon can be explained by Jacqueline Rose, an overly Freudian perspective, in a way that repetition is an insistence, that is, as the constant pressure of something hidden but not forgotten. In her interpretations of rephotographing activities, "repetition actually becomes a valuable tool that can act to intensify and illuminate precisely through representation/pressure, which returns the reader/viewer to some element that has been repressed, removed, rejected."
