My Love Of Photography - Original Writing

The documentary What Remains follows photographer Sally Mann’s life over a span of five years as she balances being a mother, wife and photographer. In the film viewers are able to get an intimate glimpse of Mann’s creative process as she captures various images of her loved ones, landscapes, and even a new series that explores death. In this paper I will discuss Mann’s work detailing the criticism it receives as well as how my experience as a novice photographer parallels hers.

composition of each of her photos creates a mysterious narrative that encourages the reader to question

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 this essay the works of Robert Draper, author of “Why Photos Matter,” and Fred Ritchen, author of “Photography Changes the Way News is Reported,” will be analyzed. Though both deal with the topic of photography, their take on the matter is very different. While Ritchen is a photographer who writes on “what professional photographers will be doing in the future,” Draper is a writer for the National Geographic writing on how the photographers of the magazine share “a hunger for the unknown.” Both writers, however, write on the topic of photographers having a deeper understanding of their subjects, Ritchen due to research and practice, and Draper because the photographers “sit [with] their subjects, just listening to them.” In both essays the need for a deeper understanding of the

There is a old saying that says your eyes are they key to your soul, that saying must have came to the mind of this photographer when he say the eyes of this young lady. Even if she wasn't holding a cigarette, seeing only this girls eyes would be enough to make the most prideful of men cry their eyes out. Here eyes haunt anyone who looks at them and will make you feel sorry for her even without knowing any context around this story. The reason photographs become so iconic in our society is because you are able to capture a hole seen from one event in time, even if that event was from one hundred years ago, and still be able to have people feel so contented to this event. This photo can mean something different for every eye that sees it but the main message the author was trying to convey by taking this photo is a loss of youth and innocence.

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.

Before starting this project, I knew very little about photography, photographers, or exactly how much impact photographical images have had on our society. I have never taken a photography class, or researched too in depth about specific pictures or photographers. This project has allowed me to delve deeper into the world of photography in order to understand just how much influence pictures can have over society’s beliefs, emotions, and understandings’. I have have chosen two highly influential photographers, Diane Arbus and Dorothea Lange, who I have found to both resonate with me and perfectly capture human emotions in way that moves others.

Our memories often time embellish the memories we once had of such great people, places, times, and etc. We live these times up to standard that makes us reminisce, hurt, contemplate and so much more. The power of a photograph has been described to have worth a thousand words, metaphorically meaning of course, that what an image can capture in one instance, something that may not ever be captured through words. For too many centuries we have been without, what many of us now take for granted, the photograph. What we capture in a picture, has much more value than we often time see in our commercials, people, places, they tell a story to the ignorant, paint a picture for blind, give the deaf something to listen to, and so much more.

She looked down at the coffee table to see a brown box filled with a few things. On top, she could see some family photos in gold color frames. “Thank you,” she said to him. She walked over to her father’s chair and sat down. She became aware of an uneasy feeling around him and wanted as far away from him as possible. It may have come from her dad complaining about him for a long time. She was now wishing for her uncle to show

The photo can stir something within us; make us look within our being. The photo should not frighten or stigmatize, rather it should be reflective to cause a revolution (Barthes, Camera Lucida, 38). For the contemplation component of examining photography begins only after it executes a feeling within us (Brown, 29). There are photos that we view that make us say “this one is saying something for me” or “this exists for me”. Diana Markosian, photographer of the project 1915 did exactly this in her work. Markosian is a photojournalist who captures photos by immersing herself into the community in which she is photographing. Her photos are very intimate and bring in a mystery of past times, the place between the dimensions of memory and place

“The day I painted the butterfly for your mother, I came across a charming painting.” I stood and retrieved it. I sat back down with it still in my hands. “This is the most beautiful place I have ever seen, is it real?”

He carried on his with daily routine. He walked towards the back of the mosque, and entered a small, dim office. A desk stood in a corner of the dark room, and he struggled to switch on the lamp. The room lit up, and frames of newspapers became illuminated on the walls. He sat down slowly, careful not to upset his aching knees. He sighed, and looked over his desk. It was empty and bare of any items except for one framed picture. It was an old Polaroid photo of him and Amelia. He had insisted on taking it the night before he left, to remember her while he was at war. Every day for 2 years while he was deployed in Vietnam he kept that picture in his backpocket. Everytime he could not take anymore, when he lost his will to fight he took that picture out and remembered her,

After viewing these six pictures, I consider that it is almost impossible to feel sad or depressed when looking at Elliott Erwitt work. Finally, the essay will be finished by mentioning a quote of him that I believe perfectly represents what photography is about and how it reaches out to most people: "It's about reacting to what you see, hopefully without preconception. You can find pictures anywhere. It's simply a matter of noticing things and organizing them. You just have to care about what's around you and have a concern with humanity and the human comedy.

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.

Susan Sontag said photographs sends across the harmlessness and helplessness of the human life steering into their own ruin. Furthermore the bond connecting photography with departure from life tortures the human race. (Sontag 1977:64)