Moodle's The Black-And-White Picture

Photographs are special because you can tell an entire story with them without using a single word, it can convey emotions, and feelings. Photographs make connections, photographs can show challenges in our world along with celebrating the greatness in the world.

It is said that “The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play not with form but with time”. This makes me think that the real content of a picture, which is what the photographer tried to express, is not evident to perceive unless an explanatory text is provided. In fact, I believe that our perceptions of pictures changes over time as the historical context do. In addition, our opinions are never fixed as they are influenced by our environment. Therefore, when looking at a particular picture at a given time, it is certain that our perception of it will be different in the future based on what happen between the first time and second time we saw it.

The photographer’s angle from which he took the picture also asserts superiority over the people. This can be compared to Riis’ image of the “street arabs” on page 221 of After the Fact. Riis took that picture from an even level with the boys to express his sympathies rather than his superiorites. John Minchillo, the photographer of the picture below, seems to look down at the people in the picture both literally and figuratively. He also chose to use a picture where the son looks sad. Was this by accident? Probably not, the photographer once again wants the viewer to feel bad for the people and what better way to conjure that feeling than to depict a child appearing sad. Photography has its advantages over textual sources, but just like any article, paper, or book, the reader/viewer must take into account that the author or photographer has incorporated some type of bias into their

IIn the story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator’s husband has rented an old mansion in the country for the summer. John is relying on this vacation as the time for his wife’s nervous condition to resolve itself with rest and medicines. As the story unfolds for the readers, it becomes apparent her husband, John, is monitoring her 24 hours a day. She feels somewhat condemned that she is unable to change her circumstances and she ends up as a victim, thus confirming the dominance of men over women during that period. Between the narrator’s controlling husband and the deterioration of her mind, she inevitably snaps and becomes completely delusional.

Furthermore, the illustrations paint a beautiful picture that I like to think is an insight into a child’s mind, which I is a key element in this book and what makes it so great. Since the book is narrated by a child the intentional simplicity of the words and the controlled chaos that is the illustrations breathes unadulterated life into a rather normal children’s book.

Among the two stories “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Gilman and “A Worn Path” by Welty, they both have characters that are very powerful. Power is something that comes as a feeling, and in a story, it means that the character is of importance. In comparison of the two short stories, there are many differences, but in the end, there is always one similarity: power.

When initially looking at the iconic black and white photo, one sees a woman and two children. After closely examining the image, one sees the third child, an infant, being held by the woman.The woman is not looking directly at the camera, but the audience is able to see her gaze. The woman’s eyebrows are furrowed causing her face to appear as worried with a look of desperation. Looking more meticulously at the woman, one will notice that she has a slight frown. The woman is able to show her stress by using her right hand to pull down slightly on her face. Aside from the woman, there are three children in the photograph. Two of the children are facing away from the camera with their heads rested on the woman’s shoulder. The third child is an infant who seems to be sleeping while this photograph was taken. The woman and children in the photo are migrants that are trying to survive the Great Depression and

The narrator is given a sense of oppression from the beginning of the story by keeping a hidden diary from her husband as “a relief to her mind.” Throughout the story her true thoughts are hidden from the readers and her husband, which gives the story a symbolic perspective.

The reader is able to construct his or her thoughts by observing the small keys in each photo. Some of these keys are the use of color, setting, expression and focus in the scenery and objects around.

The first photograph I am going to discuss is photo of Ellery Shufelt with his children in Albany County, New York. Arthur Rothstein took this photograph in 1937, which was when the Great Depression was taking place in the United States. This photograph depicts many of these formal elements and techniques such as, framing, lighting, composition, and space to help portray the true meaning of the image. Arthur Rothstein uses the technique known as composition, which can be defined as the organization of the photograph by inserting elements in particular places and sizes. This assumption can be made because Rothstein places the Ellery Shufelt and his children in specific areas of the photograph to help capture an emotion or option about how people live and work American society at this time. Also, the framing and position of the door and chair outlines the photograph asymmetrically for the viewer. The door offsets the image by dividing the image with a vertical line. This basically crops the photograph making the viewer focus on the father and his children rather than the background itself. In addition, the level the camera intensifies the feeling and framing by making you feel eye level with the subjects. The use of framing allowed the photograph to make you focus and control how you perceive the image.

In this photograph it captures a black and white image of young boy at Mulberry Street during the San Gennaro festival. The focal point at a glance seem to be of the young boy who was about to pose for the picture with a smile on his face but his face actually came out blurry. The image has a low lighting condition,

There are several words that came to my mind when thinking about how I view children. To me, I see children as adventurous, imaginative, curious, talkative, knowledgeable, creative, active, independent, loving, and much more. When I came up with those words as I thought about my nephews and niece and the interactions that I have had with them. As I was creating my artifact, I was thinking about those words and how I could put those words into something visual. The idea of having a child’s silhouette filled with different images came to my mind. Each image represents how I perceive children.

Because the boy’s posture is different, the viewers' eyes rest on him first, then move on to the other family members. All things considered, the monochromatic color scheme, vertical lines, and spatial positioning create an image that would challenge the widely held nativistic ideas of the time and spark Lewis Wickes Hine’s career as a photographer

The violent markings of the photo album and its images, however, produce an equally powerful message that jars the memory as it disrupts and distorts the photographic chronicle of her life and that of her family and friends. The result is a complex visual experience that addresses the use of images in producing knowledge and making history.

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).