First of all, I really like the opening sentence. It immodestly caught my attention and made me want to read more. It explains how it can be easy to forget that we all live in a physical world. We are actually part of something, not just an imagination. It then goes on to explain that we live in such a digital age, and everything we hear, see, games, apps, videos, news articles, and photographs are produced by us, real humans. But the things that we consider genuine do not actually exist. This really makes you think, what does this mean? Well, for example I am reading this on my laptop, and the letters I am reading an typing are conceived as impulses or energy rather than things. Old photos have been scanned and made digital. Even though we can hold the printed image physically, it has a place in the world. It’s occupying space. The mid 1940’s has physical presence as well. The images I am about to talk about are accurate representations of a city struggling to rebuild and again some sense of “normality” after suffering destruction of WW2. The damage of the images, like the spot, mold, etc, are eerie but they provide another way to consider what we call “real.” All of the things McAvoy captured, did happen. Yet, after the war, the only to you could find was hunger, cold, and depression. His images were taken and transformed into something else that was “ear-abstract, ghostly works, within which one can still see remnants of the robust photojournalism that McAvoy
Winogrand took photos of everything he saw; he always carried a camera or two, loaded and prepared to go. He sought after to make his photographs more interesting than no matter what he photographed. Contrasting many well-known photographers, he never knew what his photographs would be like he photographed in order to see what the things that interested him looked like as photographs. His photographs resemble snapshots; street scenes, parties, the zoo. A critical artistic difference between Winogrand's work and snapshots has been described this way, the snapshooter thought he knew what the subject was in advance, and for Winogrand, photography was the process of discovering it. If we recall tourist photographic practice, the difference becomes clear: tourists know in advance what photographs of the Kodak Hula Show will look like. In comparison, Winogrand fashioned photographs of subjects that no one had thought of photographing. Again and again his subjects were unconscious of his camera or indifferent to it. Winogrand was a foremost figure in post-war photography, yet his pictures often appear as if they are captured by chance. To him and other photographers in the 1950s, the previous pictures seemed planned, designed, visualized, understood in advance; they were little more than pictures, in actual fact less, because they claimed to be somewhat else the examination of real life. In this sense, the work of Garry Winogrand makes a motivating comparison to Ziller's
In Chapter 8 of After the Fact in the article, “The Mirror with a Memory” by James West Davidson and Mark Lytle, the authors tell the story of photography and of a man names Jacob Riis. Riis came from Scandinavia as a young man and moved to the United States. Riis firsthand experienced the bad conditions in the heart of the slums of New York. He worked from place to place, doing odd jobs until he found a job as a police reporter for the New York Tribune. Riis lived in a slum called “The Bend.” When he became a reporter, Riis aspired to make people see the awful conditions of “The Bend.” Riis was continuously disappointed because his articles did not receive much attention or sympathy he was looking for. He then vowed to write a book called
R: Through this passage, McCandless conveys how even though there is disappointment that his camera malfunctions and he cannot journal his journeys, it is a minor setback because the true goal of his adventures is to live life to the fullest. His goal is to leave all earthly materials, such as money, cars, and society behind him, in order to remove his “baggage” and focus on what matters most to his life. This statement struck me as quite resonant because as technology becomes a more and more prominent portion of everyone’s daily life, the amount of time and effort that we as a society put into appreciating nature, our friends, our family, and our daily activities become less and less. Instead, we take pictures so that we may “revisit” moments in our lives that were “touching”, when in fact the actual moments themselves
As we know, the result of “Art is” is “Art is” which returned in an ephemeral form at the Studio Museum. All forty photographs are on display on the basement level of the galleries, which are supposedly reserved for pieces in their permanent collection. The room just outside, whether coincidentally or not, is filled with photos of students - reflecting personal memories. How the museum decides to play with this, is by missing them with old-timer photos of Harlem from the
For instance dozens of children coming of age the way the harsh street life taught them, which gives them the simulation of a rough protective shell that could be spotted miles away but deep inside is the sensitive story. There is no need to get off the car to really see how bad the conditions of the people shelters. In every corner, you spot families huddled in order to feel each other’s warmth like a duffle coat, cozy and comforting. On the hottest of summer days you could see the heat bounces off the streets, and causes an illusion of dancing waves. Magnifying
In “Why We Take Pictures,” Susan Sontag discusses the increase use of technology and its ability to impact the daily lives of mankind. Taking pictures is a form of self-evolution that slowly begins to shape past and present experiences into reality. Sontag argues how the use of photography is capable of surpassing our reality by helping us understand the concept of emotion, diversity, and by alleviating anxiety and becoming empowered. Moreover, according to her argument, people are able to construct a bond between the positive or negative moments in life to cognitively release stress through reminiscing. Therefore, Sontag claims that photography itself can help with reshaping individual’s perspectives of reality by being able to empathize with the emotions portrayed through an image. Thus, giving
He suggests that our society will become soon become similar to dystopian society's in that we will have discovered to annihilate the entire human race. Clearly, Bradbury's disturbing vision of the future was influenced by his composing context when he bore witness to the horrific event of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the complete destruction of those cities; the burnt empty house, dead streets and flattened buildings were a result of the beginning of nuclear warfare. This is highlighted through his use of descriptive imagery in "the entire west face of the house was burnt, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man… Here as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers…a small boy… a ball and opposite him a girl," when Bradbury describes the condition of the outside of the house. This grim tableau of ordinary domesticity reinforces the vulnerability of the unsuspecting, innocent victims who were obliterated by the blast in a single moment. The silhouettes connote the dehumanisation and loss of identity experienced by everyone who became collateral damage in war, conveying a sense of despair for the victims within the audience. This notion of the complete eradication of humanity is further developed through his use of onomatopoeia when the haunting emptiness of
His attempt to depersonalize the subjectivity that Bartleby represents crushes a part of himself. The photograph can only deal with a particle of experience but, as Bartleby explains to the lawyer, “I am not particular” (Melville, “Bartleby” 69)” (Weiner,
The photograph is severely cropped which presents the image as a fragment instead of a whole scene. This lack of wholeness within the photograph becomes another layer to the metaphor of memory that reverberates throughout the image. Memory often arrives in one’s thoughts in the form of fragments that must then be pieced together. The viewer of the photograph must rely on the little information that Davis did not crop out, just as a person must rely on the attainable information in
It was the only way to find relief for the constant ache. I could not bear to burn the photographs, they were too lovely. And deep inside, I knew I couldn't disorient the truth. I began making copies of the photographs. I kept the originals in a box under my new bed. I would cut you out of the photographs or erase like, Stalin censoring Trotsky in Russia. We talked about the situation in Russia before you were displaced from my life. Do you remember? You were angry at communists and angered at Stalin’s measures to keep power, you said it was the “falsification of history”. The irony is scornful. From a nurse to a housewife, I became a plastic surgeon. Only it wasn’t a face I was fixing but, a memory. A girlfriend took me out to dancing on
When you see a well taken photograph what's the main thing you think? Well a great many people trust that photography is just connected with top of the line computerized cameras, however a differed number of experts think this is not true anymore. Another medium iPhones photography gives the two experts and non-the capacity to take wonderful pictures without all the specialized weight behind it. In a meeting when asked How might you react to feedback that iPhone photography is less important than conventional film photography, where each shot must be created Julian Calverley expressed, "It's about observation. You don't need to shake off heaps of shots, you can at present simply take 10. I could never backpedal to film. The quality is better now, the capacity to support something on a shoot is there it goes out on a limb. You can go out and shoot and process a film and after that play with it in the darkroom much like you take a photo carefully and do the after creation. Nothing's extremely changed just discernment. Individuals say, 'Gracious it's been photoshopped,' yet in the days of yore, it was extremely worthy to avoid and consume on a print. It's simply the same (Hoyle standard). To be more correct what she implies is suppose for instance one individual likes to take photographs on film and alternate likes to take photographs on an advanced camera both take awesome pictures it only about the impression of which one they like better finished the other. Which conveys me
Although Sturken and Cartwright claim it is quite easy to fall for the misconception that photographs are “unmediated copies of the real world” (Sturken & Cartwright, 17), this is no longer true, if it ever was. While cumbersome, even before the advent of image editing software, it was possible to modify photographs. Furthermore, in contemporary society, we have completely lost faith in mass media representation; rarely do people expect images to be completely unmodified anymore. This is especially visible in western culture since people are pressured to conform into highly specific aesthetics where even a “natural” look is artificially crafted with makeup and digital filters. Even disregarding direct manipulation to a print through methods such as Photoshop, photographs are manipulated in such obvious ways, it almost seems absurd to point it out. The framing, lighting, and positioning are always adjusted by the photographer. Therefore, people themselves are a type of manipulation; a representative filter through which biases are imbued. In effect, Sturken and Cartwright’s conclusion that all camera-generated images bear an “aura of machine objectivity” (Sturken & Cartwright, 16) stemming from “the … legacy of still-photography” (Sturken & Cartwright, 17) is
It creates an illogical connection between ‘here-now’ and the ‘there-then’. As the photograph is a means of recording a moment, it always contains ‘stupefying evidence of this is how it was’. In this way, the denoted image can naturalise the connoted image as photographs retain a ‘kind of natural being there of objects’; that is, the quality of having recorded a moment in time. Barthes stresses that as technology continues to “develop the diffusion of information (and notably of images), the more it provides the means of masking the constructed meaning under the appearance of the given meaning’ (P159-60).
“The world…is crowded, not necessarily with occupants and not at all with memorable experiences, but with happenings; it is a ceaseless flow of seductive trivialities which invoke neither reflection, nor choice but instant participation.” (Oakeshott) The idea of the lacking of realness is one of the major themes carried out throughout the novel White Noise by Don DeLillo, especially through the device of the television.
to get us on the edge of our seats, such as Katie's fake death, when