PICTURE PERFECT?

Lecture 4- Picture stories

A brief History:

Ever since the dawn of mankind, pictures have been used to communicate, to decorate living areas and to tell stories as they inadvertently recorded the passage of time.  It is believed by historians that some of these earliest art forms where thought to have been created by the cave dwellers during the Neolithic or ‘New stone” era.  Dating back to the early Bronze age somewhere around 15 000 – 10 000 BC, this period in time offers examples such as those which can be seen in the caves at Lascraux in France.

                               Cave painting stories - Lascraux in France

The Nerja seal paintings- Malaga, Spain

(Radiocarbon dated to between 43,500 and

42,300 years old.)

For Information on the recent discovery of the

‘First Neanderthal cave paintings in Spain’ 

                                         - Click Here

With the continued modernisation man and the invention of parchment, the drawings moved from rock faces to pages which were eventually bound into books.  Some of the oldest and most chronologically accurate books recorded in history are books of faith.

 The Book of Kells (Found in Ireland) is considered to be; “the finest surviving illuminated manuscript to have been produced in medieval Europe.”-  Melissa Snell, About.com Guide

Book of Kells – Ireland 800

Other amazing examples include the ‘Diamond Sutra’, which was carved on a wooden scroll. This historic art work is considered to be by the British National Library as; ‘the world's earliest complete survival of a dated printed book’.

Carbon dated back to 868, the Sutra is unquestionably one of the most important sacred works of the Buddhist faith.

                                                               Diamond Sutra

Sculptures and stained glass windows were also used in Christian faiths to portray the books and stories in the bible for the greater population who were illiterate. This allowed the less educated public to understand visually what they were to believe, spiritually.

With the invention of newspapers which dates back to the Acta Diurna, published in Rome in 59BC, the written word became more available to the common man in the street. The nineteenth and early twentieth centauries brought exponential development with the introduction of printing presses, journalists, photographs and advertisement. The first ever, colour reproduction in a Newspaper was published by the Scottish Daily Record & Mail in 1936 and since then the development in photo journalism has boomed into the Digital phenomenon that it is today.

Click Here- to see time line of the Newspaper industry