Indexical nature of images, first color photo show at Moma was images intended not as art; ads, science, etc. and the repurposing of these images. ‘The relative vulgarity of the medium’. Vintage reference images used to test colors, processes, etc -‘china girls’- the inherent racial bias - NyTimes just published a piece on this. “It’s become a stock move to use stock images,Their genericness, and our attendant discomfort with the notion that experience or appearance can so readily be distilled into the “typical,” provides a ready-made index of societal codes; while the inclusion of the technical marks of production points to the status of images as commodities”. “Now the apparatus of image-making has been revealed so many times that the revelation has become its own generic fetish”. On film stocks/ colors on kodak - Rather than increasing accuracy, our familiarity breeds a kind of mnemonic distortion *memory colors*. Semiotic Insanity/ Aesthetic Banality. What has been considered synthetic, exaggerated, or natural in color photography only reflects our preferences, our ideas about the desirability of a look. Stephen shore - postcards