Depopulating the painters of the second-hand world

Half a century ago, sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote of the “second-hand world,” one in which much of people’s experience of the world comes, literally, second-hand — through media:

[I]n their everyday life they do not experience a world of solid fact; their experience itself is selected by stereotyped meanings and shaped by readymade interpretations. Their images of the world, and of themselves, are given to them by crowds of witnesses they have never met and never shall meet.

Yet for every man these images – provided by strangers and dead men – are the very basis of his life as a human being.
[emphasis added]

For me, the bulk of meaning and experience I have not witnessed directly has come to me from brilliant photographers and journalists.

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