“To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. Form a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the authentic print makes no sense.”
When I read this quote at the first time, I agreed with it. Considering the photographic negative, every print from it does not have any differences. Even though this idea is the fact, it is only about the physical object. How about the feeling of the photographer to the photo? The feeling is the soul of the photo. In the other word, the prefect picture, which the photographer wants to catch and show people, is the authentic print. The physical print is only the most appropriate one to the ideal one, and the ideal photo will be in his/her brain forever. Therefore, I disagree with him, because the authentic print does exist, but we cannot see it, we can only feel it through the physical print.
Is there a role for the ‘authentic’ in an age of digital design and manufacture? In my opinion, the answer is yes. The reason is that every individual product will have its own experiment, such as, they will have different owners, they will be in a different environment and their owners might get them in a different way. Each experiment makes it different from the others; even they have the same looking. The experiment changes the way of how their owners think of them. Therefore, for each owner, each product is the original one, ever there are thousands copies of it in the world.
