To read, and comment.

34 Comments

1. 

   Jess Weeden
   4:39 pm, 01.29.12

   “The camera has brought people a new, and essentially pathetic, relation to themselves, to their physical appearance, to aging, to their own mortality. It is a kind of pathos which never existed before.” -Sontag

   Susan Sontag makes several points as to why the camera has changed modern society. However, I think the greatest impact that it has had on people is reflected in the above statement. The rich commissioned paintings in order to preserve their image at certain stages in life. But even then, you can only paint so much. There were limited physical, artistic representations of people, events and objects with only a select few to afford these amenities.

   With the invention of the camera and its advances, it only took a matter of time before the benefits extended beyond the wealthy. A photo can be persuasive, but it does provide an accurate physical representation of whatever the image should be. The gaps of society were pulled closer as the reproduction of cameras and printing processes became more widespread. What painters worked thousands of years doing was essentially replaced (to an extent) with everyday people snapping pictures of everyday events and things.

   “The Vietnamese situate themselves in an historical continuum. That continuum contains repetitions. Americans, if they ever think about the past, are not interested in repetition…Americans have a completely linear sense of history—insofar as they have one at all.” -Sontag

   Another aspect of Sontag’s opinion that I found interesting was the view towards photography across cultures. The appreciation for photos of friends and monuments by the Asians in contrast to Westerners tendency to capture “peeling paint” or other artistic mundanes, is especially intriguing. I wouldn’t have expected the difference to exist.

   When we consider the simple difference in approach to photo content across cultures it shouldn’t surprise us then to learn how our differences carry over into perceptions of history. The way we take a picture and save to refer to later is dependent of our society. Sontag talks about how the Great Depression is viewed as a “one time thing” and still, there are several great photographic works from the era. Do we look back on it and envision history repeating itself? Well according to the article, no. Ok, so my endless rambling probably doesn’t make much sense, but this fact shouldn’t surprise us, and yet it does when we see an older image and parallel it to a current one.

   “The photograph is its posthumous existence.” -Sontag

   I think Sontag makes a profound point in our approach to photography and its use. But I must echo her dissatisfaction in that we can learn so much and benefit society if we would remember the events that go behind the image. She also says that we remember events as single images rather than a moving frame. If this is the case, then we still have a lot to learn from the past if we are to improve the future.

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2. 

   Leah Rama
   2:19 pm, 02.16.12

   Susan Sontag made some unique observations about the way photography has affected our society and relationship with history, and I found myself relating to her ideas. Over the past year I have really begun to understand the bridge between what she calls “scientific” and “moralistic” photography. Like different language tenses, one is more factual and the other is more expressive of essence.

   I see in my generation a renewed appreciation for unconventional beauty. We tend to like imperfect voices in music, a sense of humor that celebrates awkwardness, and photos of colorfully rusted hinges. As Sontag puts it, “It’s a way of aestheticizing the whole world.” Looking through history, it is easy to see changing paradigms in which people valued only the most glamorous, appreciated imperfections, or focused on tragedies at hand. These paradigms seem to trickle down into photography, reflecting the taste and concerns of the general populace.

   Photography not only tells us about the content of a photo, but also a context. From historical photos, we learn both about the subjects and the priorities of their time. As Sontag points out, historical photography “does weird things to our sense of time.” The fact that we are able to see what our grandparents looked like as children—what they wore, how their hair was, where they lived—gives us a unique, humanizing perspective on history that is fairly new to society. Seeing photos of people from what seems like an eternity ago makes us realize that we are not all that different. I think it is this humanizing aspect of photography that I enjoy the most- the way it makes us identify with people with whom we may have little in common. I think that aspect alone can be one of the most persuasive and intriguing aspects of the role of photography in our society today.

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   • 

     Jess Weeden
     2:40 pm, 02.20.12

     Leah- You highlight an excellent point. I don’t think that we realize how much our generation has embraced the “imperfect”. The way you stated, “We tend to like imperfect voices in music, a sense of humor that celebrates awkwardness, and photos of colorfully rusted hinges” exemplifies current culture more than I thought. You did a great job pulling in your own observations and experiences along with Sontag’s to summarize how photography really reveals our culture today.

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   • 

     Nicholas Hill
     11:58 am, 03.07.12

     Wow, Leah, way to sum up our generation! We seem to be so disillusioned, as a group, that, now, when we can no longer see perfection in this world, we embrace the imperfection, because it is not only what we would call “truer,” but also because it is a reflection of the imperfection inside each of us. Flaws give something “character.” Perhaps, rather than giving character, flaws simply reveal our own character?
     I seem to have digressed. Anyway, great post; it’s quite thought-provoking.

     Reply
3. 

   Nil Santana
   9:28 pm, 02.16.12

   I have really enjoyed these two posts so far.

   Sontag is socially conscious in her writing as it relates to photography. She once suggested that socially concerned photographers assume that their work can convey some kind of stable meaning—if that’s ever possible—can reveal truth. But partially because the photograph is, always, an object in a context. If you’re interested in her thoughts, I suggest a reading of Sontag’s book: On Photography. (ACU’s Library call number: 770.1 S699O).

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4. 

   Mary Delaughter
   12:01 pm, 02.18.12

   I found this interview interesting. The most intriguing fact being that she did not own a camera or participate in taking photos, but wrote immensely on the subject, being completely fascinated by them. I found her reasoning, “I might get hooked” to be playing it on the safe side, choosing to maintain seeing the world from a writer’s point of view instead of exploring the photographer inside of her. However, I really enjoyed her comments on how the camera is the most influential invention since the printing press. It is foreign for me to think of a time when I couldn’t imagine myself, my parents, or even my grandparents as children because I have grown up with photographs of us all. I also really appreciated her comments on how photography allows us to see the world in different ways than we might experience it in “real life”. Her example was of the cathedral. With two photographs side by side she could view it close up, taking in details, and also see its entirety. When present, we have to choose how we are going to see it in a single moment. However, one benefit to being present is the other senses are being exercised simultaneously, while photographs can only give visual representations of what is there.

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   • 

     Jess Weeden
     2:44 pm, 02.20.12

     Mary- I completely missed the part where we learn she hasn’t actually been involved in the photo process in any physical way. Interesting, thanks. That does make her position more credible. I agree with you, the comment on how the camera is the most influential invention since the printing press really is true. To have lived 200 years ago would mean more than we fear a loss of technology and advancement, but a loss of history. Pictures reveal more than we recognize.

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   • 

     Austin Anderson
     11:49 am, 03.04.12

     I enjoyed Sontag’s cathedral analogy too. A photograph gives us an entirely new perspective on an event because it allows us to step back and analyze a moment in a way we couldn’t have if we were in the moment physically. However, being physically there allows us to experience the full breadth of the moment with all our senses. There are advantages to both.

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5. 

   Juliana Kocsis
   2:50 pm, 02.29.12

   A few weeks ago for my nonfiction class that is focusing on travel writing, one of our assignments was to write a short piece about why we write about travel. In my piece, I told the story of an old photograph my grandfather has of himself, dressed in a sailor outfit, and standing between two Pacific Islander women on a beach. It’s a photograph I was always especially fascinated with growing up because I knew the stories behind it—my grandfather used to tell countless stories about the years he spent in the South Pacific serving in the Navy during WWII. What I find interesting now, thinking about that photograph and those stories, are the differences between what a photograph tells us and what a narrative tells us—the linearity of the stories and the antilinearity of the photograph. While the photograph captures the moment, the narrative captures the context of the moment. Both, I think, capture the imagination in different ways. From the photograph, the viewer can project limitless assumptions and stories onto that moment; from the narrative, the listener can imagine infinite details about the setting and components of the story. Both engage our sense of history and “story” in different ways, which are becoming increasingly complex as more and more technologies develop.

   For those reasons, I don’t know that I would agree entirely with Sontag when she says that there has been “a breakdown in narrative skills” so that “few people tell stories well anymore.” The camera and photography have certainly changed the way that stories are told, but I wouldn’t necessarily call it a “breakdown” in our society’s ability to narrate a story. I think specifically about the recent surge in personal blogging—people are using text, images, videos, and other forms of media to communicate and create meaning from their experiences and their contexts. Although those forms of communication go far beyond the realm of photography into other technologies, I wonder if photography wasn’t the original medium that prepared current society to express itself differently than it had previously. We may have lost the linearity of a narrative, but photography has allowed for freer associations between what might seem otherwise disparate elements in our experiences. It has, as Sontag notes, created a more profound sense of the “fragment,” which is elevated “to a privileged position.” With that cultural and social shift in understanding, I think we’ve become more sensitive to finding meaning in a variety of places and creating meaning that doesn’t necessarily need “an ending” like narratives do (and the narrative itself has broken down in many ways; take recent books and movies, for instance, many of which lack satisfying endings). Sontag certainly makes compelling arguments that this loss of linearity has affected our historical and social consciousness and reduced experience to personal perception; even so, perhaps we can still say that photography—and now newer forms of media—has allowed for new ways of understanding that change the way we create meaning culturally and socially.

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   • 

     Jordan Havens
     2:00 am, 03.05.12

     I definitely agree with your last sentiment. I think, although photography and other “new media” have broken down old narrative institutions, they have definitely created an intriguing set of of their own centered around a more forced perspective. The kind of unification of visual angle in photography and cinema especially set them apart from something like a novel, which leaves the events of the narrative, in many ways, up to the minds eye of the reader.

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   • 

     Leah Rama
     10:11 am, 03.09.12

     Juliana,

     I liked the way to tied in the “linearity” versus “anti-linearity” that Sontag describes. It is sort of mind-blowing that a single image captures a finite moment in time and makes it visually infinite, in the sense that the moment will live on forever in the form of a photograph.
     Your connection with the linear nature of narratives was a great contrast!

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   • 

     Nil Santana
     10:45 am, 03.09.12

     Well, it is also interesting to investigate how photography is intrinsic to language. One departure point could be Roland Barthes’ writings on photography. As semiotician and literary critic, he also had great interest in how photographs communicated. In particular, I’d point to his short book Camera Lucida, where he primarily exposed two main ideas: studium, and punctum. Studium being the formal elements which are present on the image, public, common to everyone. The latter understood as private, it triggers my own memories, “piercing” my eyes thru subjectivity. Just another thought!

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     • 

       Juliana Kocsis
       1:07 pm, 03.09.12

       I’ve heard of Camera Lucida but never really explored it–those theories are very interesting. The dynamics between objectivity and subjectivity in photography are intriguing.
6. 

   Austin Anderson
   11:36 am, 03.04.12

   “I don’t think the problem with photography is that it’s too simple but that it’s too imperious a way of seeing.” – Sontag

   The interview with Sontag was intriguing to me. After reading some of her perceptions about photography, I gained a whole new perspective on how we as a nation have been shaped by photographs. I never really thought about it before, but Photography really has completely reshaped our views of the world. It’s weird to think what life would be like without pictures…what if the only way we could remember what we once looked like was through memories? The section of the interview where Sontag mentions that Photographs have morphed our sense of time was something that stood out to me. I think that being able to physically see our past selves gives us a sense of urgency in life. We look at a picture and our first response is usually “wow, time flies…”. Maybe photography is a contributing factor to why the world moves so much faster today than it did in the past. A picture takes us back to a moment in time that feels like it was just yesterday, but it may have been five or ten years since that moment. Making that connection puts into perspective how short life really is, so we try and do as much as we can while we can.

   Sontag also described Americans as having a “linear sense of history” in that we have no interest in historical repetition. I often find myself very apathetic towards pictures taken of tragic events in which I was not a part of. I can look at these kinds of things and usually make no real emotional connection because I see it as the “posthumous existence” of something stuck in the past. In reality, history repeats itself all the time for those who don’t take care to learn about it. Americans, including myself, are ignorant. It’s so evident in what’s going on in the world today. It seems as though no matter how many times we dig ourselves into a hole, we never learn (and I’m talking about the financial crises). Like Sontag said, our origins most likely have something to do with this. Our ancestors migrated to this land in hopes of forgetting, and this mentality has carried on throughout generations. We definitely need to be more like the Vietnamese and place more importance on history.

   Sontag also talked about the dangers of photography in the interview. In class, we discussed the credibility of photography and how it is constantly being challenged today by people who bend truth through the manipulation of images. Photography is very useful in that it is a medium for presenting truth in a manner that is very relatable to people. However, sometimes a picture is not an accurate representation of reality, or it has been skewed to present something in a way that is biased towards the photographer (especially with new technology today). Sontag is right in that photography is an imperious way of seeing. There are times in life when the complex needs to be simplified (which is often done through photography), but simplifying complexity can often lead to misconceptions about life itself. Photography is an extremely advantageous tool in finding beauty in any moment, but there are times when the full spectrum of a moment simply can’t be captured.

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7. 

   Jordan Havens
   1:52 am, 03.05.12

   “When [people] report an interesting event, their accounts frequently peter out in the statement, ‘I wish I had had my camera.’ There is a general breakdown in narrative skills, and few people tell stories well anymore.” — Sontag

   For all the merits of photography, and I believe there are a significant many, I do think there is some veracity to what Sontag expresses here, to the breakdown of linear narrative in favor or the photographic antilinear. When a picture is taken, it’s solidified, it’s a testament to an experience that can be captured and displayed; the need to communicate a moment through any other means is suddenly rendered unnecessary. This is what I think Sontag means in explicating the lazy gesture “I wish I’d had my camera.” We feel security in taking a photograph to capture a moment and so rob ourselves of the practice of mining that moment intellectually in an effort to preserve it in words and feelings.

   For example, I go to the Azeri countryside. I, through the power of the
   camera, take “true” images to help me remember the time later. If I did not have this ability, I would need to rely on memory, on the stories of the place, on a narrative of sensations and events that I would mentally scramble to collect as I experience the event. When I recall the Azeri countryside, I would think of stray goats wandering in the sand, being prodded along by a raggedy boy with a switch. I would smell again the roast lamb and the pomegranates and the oil being drilled off the coast of the Caspian Sea. A picture takes that from me, it forces me to remember the event in terms of that single, antilinear still and not through the timeline of events that were constructed in my memory during the experience. It, in essence, tells the story for me.

   I no longer remember things as I felt them. I no longer have a story about the Azeri countryside because stories are centered around mystery and around revelation, around the subtle events of perception that unfold as I recall them. Pictures are inherently about certainties and about instantaneous knowing. I see a picture and I know all. My mind has no need to conjure a narrative. Events lose their fiction and their romantic inclination and become portrayals of scientific detail on computer screens and in scrapbooks.

   The world, then, is demystified as it loses the magic that the human recollection gives it in linear narrative.

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   • 

     Mary Delaughter
     11:14 am, 03.09.12

     Jordan,

     There is so much truth in this! I think of the past when people were great story tellers and people would sit around a campfire just to listen (or that is what I imagine). Today, everyone wants to see a picture, or an entire album. And how the meaning of each photo can get lost, the people who are in it and the stories behind it. We no longer want to be told about it, we want to see it for ourselves. But then the beauty of description, smells, tastes, feelings cannot be fully expressed in a photograph. The experience gets reduced down to what can be seen in the shot. It’s only if we take time to listen to what is behind it do we understand more fully.

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   • 

     Juliana Kocsis
     1:04 pm, 03.09.12

     Jordan,

     I think that’s an interesting and very apt assessment of what photographs do to our memory. In some regards, they leave much less room for interpretation and the construction of meaning. I know that goes against what I suggested in my own post, but I do agree that photographs can inspire both reactions–either opportunities for more meaning or restrictions on the imagination. Excluding artistic photography, photographs intended to capture a moment or scene from one own life often offer only a more simplified visual stimulus. The memory might be more vivid visually and sensorily (is that a word?), but it does hinder the imagination from reconstructing the scene in the mind. Good thought!

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8. 

   Nicholas Hill
   12:18 pm, 03.07.12

   “Americans, if they ever think about the past, are not interested in repetition. Major events like the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Depression are treated as unique, extraordinary, and discrete. It’s a different relation to experience: there is no sense of repetition.” -Susan Sontag

   As an American-born resident of Europe, I am constantly encountering cultural subtleties different from those with which I am familiar. In particular, views of history differ greatly between the culture in which I was raised and the culture in which I now reside. To an American my age, the Second World War is long past, a distant string of events whose lessons we’ve already learned. But, to a German, these things happened yesterday, and the concern of historical repetition is very real, a topic of everyday conversation. For example, during the past FIFA World Cup, I was engaged in a conversation with my neighbor, Elmar, that went something along these lines:

   Elmar: There are many German flags flying this year.
   Me: Of course there are; it’s the World Cup!
   Elmar: No, the past years it has not been so. Since the War, many have been afraid to express love or pride for their homeland because of the way it might make them look.

   So, when Sontag describes the typical American’s view of history, I feel like I’m picking up a conversation I began only yesterday. And, yet, this new speaker has added much to the subject. If we have recorded the event in our history books, we need not be responsible for the event itself, because it is past and part of another time, a time in which my current self was not involved. It is the same with photography. Americans take photographs to save something, but also to destroy it. If we have a photograph in our possession, we need not maintain possession of the subject.

   But this is a dangerous way to contemplate both photography and history. If we allow memory simply for the purpose of eliminating responsibility, we begin down the path of forgetting, perhaps not forgetting the event itself, but forgetting that the event happened to people just like us, whose information was, perhaps, less complete, but whose intentions were the same. For, though time and circumstances change, humans do not change. And it is the moment we forget that fact, the moment we begin to believe that the past was an anomaly, that we begin to abuse both history and photography as tools of erasure, rather than preservation.

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   • 

     Nil Santana
     10:35 am, 03.09.12

     Absolutely! In many ways, photography is at play within those dualities.

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9. 

   Kaitlyn Wilkins
   3:23 pm, 03.08.12

   I think it is interesting to read Sontag’s comparison of the Chinese culture using a camera versus the American culture. As Americans we try to make the mundane beautiful. I think though, in part, that our interest in making the mundane beautiful is tied up in our history. I know Sontag made a point of how differently Americans live out history. We tend to categorize events and place them in certain eras and then not live it as part of our daily lives. Instead major events become display hallways in a museum. Sontag says, “Major events like the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Depression are treated as unique, extraordinary, and discrete.” They don’t become part of our running story. However, I think the way American’s view life and photography is because of those events. We have seen as a nation that something great can come from nothing. That a colony of religious rejects can become when of the main powers in the world economy.
   We believe that no one is stuck where they are. If people work hard enough they can become anything. This idea now has a title to it, The American Dream. It is something that is recognized throughout the nation and the world. People flock to the U.S. to maybe just maybe achieve the American Dream. The crumbling painted farmhouse door can be made into something beautiful that everyone can enjoy.

   I really enjoyed Sontag’s point that photographs have given us perspective into the pasts of the people around us. Before, people never knew what their parents looked like as children. Photographs have become a way of relating people to each other. At one point, my parents were just like me. We can recognize that people’s lives are not so far removed from our own. It is an interesting thought to think how that part of society and culture has changed. Photographs have become a way of sharing experiences. Sontag talks about people’s lack of ability to tell stories anymore without their camera. Sight has become a greater form of sharing an experience or truth. The opening of the article asks Sontag the question of whether or not the written word is dying out. I think in a sense it is. The time it takes to look at a photograph and grasp the gravity of the experience is less than the time it takes to read about every detail seen. A photograph that is snapped from a “real” situation seems more truthful than one imagined by words written on a page. Also, just about anyone can take a photo. The gift of expressing one’s self well with words is not something anyone can do. This could tie back into our culture of media. Texting. Tweeting. Emailing. Facebooking. The forms of communication have become more compact. I think the phrase describing photographs is a good way to summarize this sentiment. “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

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10. 

    Leah Rama
    10:21 am, 03.09.12

    Random additional link…
    This is a link to a photo collection from a project the EPA did in the 70’s called “Documerica.” It was intended to capture the issues and overall essence of America at that time. I just thought it was an interesting social commentary that related to our class!

    Here is the link:
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/collections/72157620729903309/

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    • 

      Nil Santana
      10:33 am, 03.09.12

      Thanks for the link, Leah. Check out the link below when you have a chance. “Shorpy” has a wide collection of antique photos, which also helps us to understand the development of our society. Most of the images were taken in the early 1900s and account for an incredible description of the hard times. Some may be packed with more stories than others.

      Shorpy
      http://www.shorpy.com/

      Reply
11. 

    Sara Shoultz
    12:47 pm, 03.09.12

    Sontag raised several intriguing points in her interview with Movius about photography’s impact on modern society. In fact, photography seems to have helped create modern society (or Western society) as we now know it. I found that while Sontag made bold statements about the effects of the photograph today, she fell short of placing a value upon these observations. This left much to be interpreted in the interview. I want to delve into a few quotes that I ruminated upon as I read and reread the article:
    1. “They don’t understand photography as a method of appropriating and transforming reality—in pieces—which denies the very existence of inappropriate or unworthy subject matter.”
    Sontag, to me, seems to be saying that the advent of photography has about a new awareness of images of around us. With the advent of photography, the questions of “What is ideally photographable?” or “What is not photographable?” have naturally come about. I would argue that every artistic period has tried to answer this question. Each photographer’s answer is informed by their environment-familial, political, social, and economic. Therefore, society informs the photographer of what is integral to the image being captured. Whether the focus be lighting, lines, symmetry, etc., the subject informs the artist of style, not the other way around.
    2. “Never before in human history did people have any idea what they looked like as children…The camera has brought people a new, and essentially pathetic, relation to themselves, to their physical appearance, to aging, to their own mortality. It is a kind of pathos which never existed before.”
    I see this as Sontag’s stance on the aging and death problem that Americans today have. Photographs have brought the human race a problem unique to the last century or so of people: a keen awareness of how quickly youth slips away and death approaches. While chronicling one’s life in photography can be a beautiful thing, human nature has perverted this admiration of beauty into a fear of degeneration. Like never before, humans must face that the past is no longer in a concrete way. Photographs give us a measure of progression, or in many cases, regression. I think photography has allowed those more interested in improving the future to learn; those more interested in preserving the past have found false idols in the photographic image.
    3. “Americans, if they ever think about the past, are not interested in repetition.”
    This quote specifically relates to American society, and, again, its meaning is ambiguous. Sontag claims that, in contrast to other countries, Americans view past events as isolated and nonrepetitious. This view in society affects the way in which Americans express themselves in storytelling and photography. It seems to me that photography—used for documenting the past—takes on a different meaning when linked (or not linked) to earlier times. And as a country obsessed with “moving on”, perhaps Americans are more in conflict with the photograph than they realize. As mentioned above, remembering can be challenging , even painful. Perhaps what Sontag is trying to say is that Americans are not emotionally or psychologically equipped to handle the truths and the patterns of history unlocked in photography.

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12. 

    Sara Shoultz
    12:55 pm, 03.09.12

    I also thought this link might be relevant to our discussion of Sontag. I am posting a link to a chapter in “A World History of Photograhy” by Naomi Rosenblum. However, you can get the entire book on this site (which might help in paper-writing!).

    http://all-art.org/history658_photography11.html

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    • 

      Nil Santana
      2:18 pm, 03.09.12

      That’s right Sara — an excellent book, relevant to our discussion. Chapter Eight from same book was our pre-colloquia reading, but the entire text can provide an interesting overview of the development of photography.

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13. 

    Michelle Cornell
    10:43 pm, 03.09.12

    Mary, her comment on the camera being the most important invention since the printing press also intrigued me. I feel like this plays into the tension she talks about between writing and photographing towards the conclusion of her interview. Though they are incredible inventions in and of themselves, she presents them almost in conflict, writing being linear and photography being anti-linear. Writing gives people written history, the photograph provides a snapshot of the past. The pen gives us words to clarify our thoughts, and the camera gives us clarified sight into a captured moment. As far as inventions go, these two are both pretty great.

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      Michelle Cornell
      10:45 pm, 03.09.12

      Also, this comment was supposed to be in response to Mary’s earlier post.

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14. 

    Michelle Cornell
    11:03 pm, 03.09.12

    In her interview, Sontag provides an interesting perspective on the influence photography has in people’s lives. I really enjoyed her discussion on the way photography affects a people’s memory. When talking about these effects, she states, “I think it has to do with the nature of visual memory. Not only do I remember photographs better than I remember moving images. But what I remember of a movie amounts to an anthology of single shots. I can recall the story, lines of dialogue, the rhythm. But what I remember visually are selected moments that I have, in effect, reduced to stills.” Photographs have power because they speak to our visual memories in a way that is natural to us. As stills, photographs highlight one event that our minds and memories cling to. They memorialize one moment in time and capture a moment that is to be lifted up more than those around it. This is what makes photography as a medium very powerful. This is what allows photography to stretch beyond artistic realms into the area of social commentary. Photography does not simply record, but can also be used to highlight issues or injustices in a way that haunts or captivates our visual memories. In a way, this also heightens the responsibility of the photographer. To accurately depict a situation is an endeavor that lies with the person behind the camera; they are the ones who choose which moments will be captured and which ones will not be. As Sontag says, photography can give “us an immense amount of experience that ‘normally’ is not our experience. And by making a selection of experience which is very tendentious, ideological. While there appears to be nothing that photography can’t devour, whatever can’t be photographed becomes less important.” Thus, in some ways, by selecting which events to memorialize, photography can alter our view of history. It is the photographer’s choice behind the lens that makes all the difference.

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15. 

    Kaitlyn Wilkins
    7:41 pm, 04.12.12

    I think this is an interesting way of raising awareness while partnering with businesses. I think it goes along with our idea of using photography as a way to show society in a different way. If you want to see a sample photo of his work, follow the article to the bottom of the page and click on the link.

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    • 

      Kaitlyn Wilkins
      7:41 pm, 04.12.12

      http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/feature/2145128/exhibition-life-lights-london

      (it didn’t add it earlier….)

      Reply
16. 

    Becca Fullerton
    5:29 pm, 04.13.12

    This site links to a work of young adult fiction that I thought might interest some of you, in light of the discussion we had in this class. The author collects old photographs and polaroids of people he doesn’t know. Apparently there are boxes and boxes of them at flea markets, and he looks through them, collecting images that interest him. This book was written as a story that links together many of those photographs in a fantastic novel. It contains probably a hundred old pictures that he has assigned new meaning. It lends an interesting note to the discussion about photography as art or documentation. Once the subject and the photographer are gone, and the story forgotten, as will happen to most pictures, what value does the original intent still have?

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    • 

      Nil Santana
      5:58 pm, 04.13.12

      Very interesting text, and questions. Indeed, there are many ways a person could unpack those stories, and intentions from the photographer. Being old (others would argue ‘antique’) photographs, we are immediately launched to the past, but how can they also project a force into the present, future, as the images are reviving those stories? Thanks Becca!

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17. 

    Becca Fullerton
    5:29 pm, 04.13.12

    http://www.amazon.com/Miss-Peregrines-Home-Peculiar-Children/dp/1594744769/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1334355899&sr=1-1

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18. 

    Becca Fullerton
    5:56 pm, 04.13.12

    Sontag made two points which I found really interesting.

    The first was about seeing the cathedral, the way that photography has changed our access to every work of art. Which I think is a fascinating idea; there is so much detail that no one, but perhaps the artist, ever saw. Now, we can buy a book of photographs that showcase every detail. However, I think she overestimates the ability of photographs to share the artwork they depict. The times I’ve been able to see a cathedral or painting in real life that I had before only seen in photographs was astounding. There’s something about standing before a 20 foot high painting that a photograph can’t convey.

    The even more interesting thing to me was the idea that people had never seen what they looked like as children. I never, ever thought about that. I took for granted that I know what I looked like at every stage of life, and I think it’s a fascinating element to modern life.

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