Looking at War

In Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the Civil War, the haunting image “Harvest of Death” catches one’s eye with the seemingly endless field of corpses. The jarring facial expression on the figure in the foreground draws one into the narrative of the piece. However, our initial understanding of the image’s narrative is limited to what we can see and what we know of the circumstances surrounding it. While we know it was taken during the American Civil War, by simply looking at the photograph, we cannot know who is depicted. In black and white, it is difficult to even tell what side of the conflict these fallen soldiers fought for. We can interpret the image for our own readings, but we cannot tell what the artist intended us to see or what message he wanted to impart with it. These unknowns, however, are addressed in the related text associated with the image. These short passages can tell us a great deal about the photographer’s intentions and influence the way we read the image. Through the excerpt, we not only learn the intended meaning of the photography, but we also learn about Gardner’s political intentions and the key points he wanted his viewers to note within the image. Published as a pair, Gardner used his text to contextualize his images and inform the way we perceive them. This is clearly illustrated in “A Harvest of Death” and its accompanying passage.

When photography began to gain not only popularity, but accessibility, it became a topic of discussion on its place in art. Whether if it should be considered a fine art or whether its place lied in documentation. However, even with documentation, a broad assumption was that there could be an immediate trust. Gardner’s Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter proved that was not always the case, that although documenting the truth of the brutality of the Civil War. The addition of the shotgun that added the idea of fighting until the last minute was actually fabricated creating a disillusion. That photography is meant to depict a standstill truth subject, but viewers of photography can forget that it is still an artwork. That a photo is an image set and

Images, such as paintings and photographs, are intensely visually striking and evoke strong emotions in those who view them.“Into the Jaws of Death” provides a perfect example of that intensity, having been taken by Robert F. Sargent during the early morning hours of the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Even today the famous photograph evokes strong emotional reactions in many people who view it. This photograph served a purpose more significant than was realized at the time, to the point of becoming a pivotal point in support for the war effort. How was this accomplished? By conveying personal themes of heroism, patriotism, and mortality through devices such as angles, colors, uniforms, and proxemics.

In the novel The looking glass war by Frank Beddor it retails the novel of the adventures of alice in wonderland. In the looking glass war Alyss has found herself in a problem with her aunt Reed and her army of card shoulders breaking into hart place and killing Alyss's mom Genevieve, and she killed Alyss’s dad King Nolen when her shoulders ran a surprise attack on his men. Then she finds herself in another world where nobody knows her or cares about her. When Doge finds a way between worlds he makes it his goal to find Princess Alyss and bring her back to wonderland before the cut kill her and before she gets married and then take her over the Queendom. There is a lot of sacrifice for white imagination and good versus evil in the novel between

‘A picture says a thousand words’ this analogy often refers to photographs with immense amount of detail and meaning that it doesn’t need words or any description to exemplify its context. A photograph in particular engages an indicative role into promoting an issue that’s typical of the time. A photograph that highlights copious meaning is evident in Lawrence Beitler’s ‘Lynching of young blacks’. A role of a photograph is to provoke emotions and empathise within the subject of the picture. To do so, famous photographs often accommodate numerous conventions including the historical context, symbolic codes and technical codes. These codes and conventions operate simultaneously to epitomise the significance behind a

The assignment I choose to redo as my creative revision was MWA-2. Originally, MWA-2 was an academic essay on the documentary “The Central Park Five”. For my revision, I wanted to do a movie review poster on the documentary “The War You Don’t See”.

Before the hand-size cameras people carry around to visually document the interesting events, persons, and objects they approach, photography was not an easy feat. Despite the size and tedious process to capture photos, Mathew Brady, a documentalist from New York, employed a team of photographers to venture into the American Civil War and document its time (Megs and Purvis, 2012). Due to the overwhelming public response after this experiment, photography has proven itself to be a great documentary and communication tool upon the time of the American Civil War.

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 the short story “In the Shadow of War” by Ben Okri you can see symbolism being used all throughout the story to develop the theme a child’s innocence can only last for so long. For example Omovo’s father didn’t want him to hear news of the war and told Omovo to turn off the radio, but then it says,”When a danfo bus came, and his father went with it, Omovo turned the radio back on.” This is an example of Omovo’s father trying to shelter him from hearing about what is actually happening in Nigeria, but Omovo just becomes more curious about what is happening. In the quote the radio is used as a symbol to represent the outside world and more specifically the war going on in Nigeria at the time, after hearing about the

Photography is meant to capture the moment at hand, a moment in history that cannot be duplicated, and in some aspects, attempt to physically hold a memory. However, not every memory is made for the best. Joe Rosenthal snapped this photo on February 23, 1945 during the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II. This picture, taken hurriedly in fear of missing the ‘moment’, depicts six soldiers: five Marines and one United States Navy Corpsman from the United States hoisting the American flag. These soldiers were standing on the corpses of many people that fought and died in the battle. Having been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, it became a symbol of the United States’s power; however, the battle - ironically - was so minuscule in the span of World War II that it is not taught in most history classes. Americans have glorified the picture without acknowledging the deeper meaning of its history.

post mortem photography was one way the Victorians coped with death than it should.The readers see “ Photos of the dead were a big part

In “Ways of Seeing”, John Berger, an English art critic, argues that images are important for the present-day by saying, “No other kind of relic or text from the past can offer such direct testimony about the world which surrounded other people at other times. In this respect images are more precise and richer literature” (10). John Berger allowed others to see the true meaning behind certain art pieces in “Ways of Seeing”. Images and art show what people experienced in the past allowing others to see for themselves rather than be told how an event occurred. There are two images that represent the above claim, Arnold Eagle and David Robbins’ photo of a little boy in New York City, and Dorothea Lange’s image of a migratory family from Texas; both were taken during the Great Depression.

In his text Camera Lucida, Barthes describes the experience of having his photograph taken as a “micro-version of death” (14). The text suggests that the practice of taking photographs has a transformative property, where the subject of the photo feels the transformation from the subject to an object. The text compares the transformation to death because the photograph essentially strips the subject of life for the moment, leaving only a physical object behind. The camera can only catch an instant in time, and so as the moment the photo is taken, as Barthes describes it, is the “very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object” (14). To become an image is to become “Death in person,”

The sources perspective is basically lied upon all people becoming more efficient, as part of the source says “In carrying out this work of civilization we are fulfilling what I believe to be a national mission.” This source can also reveal that the perspective of the quote does not really admire work. Since this quote is linked to and is similar to the poem “The white man's burden.” and it says from the passage “but it must be remembered that it is a condition of the mission that we have to fulfill.”

War. A word that best describes two combatants fighting, clawing, trying to get the upper hand over one another. War is what has ravaged my land for years now. My country was once rich in resources; never short of money. But then terrorism struck, leaving the United Nations devastated after a single bombing run in 2042. It killed three to four thousand men, women, and children. This started World War III, countries took sides, nations where split, riots broke out in the streets and nuclear bombs ravaged lands leaving craters of ash and radiation. In 2052, ten years later, the war ended, people in the streets celebrated that after ten long years of fighting it all just stopped. In 2053 the king of England declared the new world