Photographic Icons: Fact, Fiction Or Metaphor Analysis

Photography, meaning “drawing with lights” in Greek, is an art as well as a science of capturing light and storing it on a medium with unprecedented accuracy. Yet, up until the late 18th century, history was mainly recorded through the techniques of painting and the press. These mediums unarguably contained a certain degree of a truth, though, it was not uncommon for events, such as war to be composed with glorified details, or an unfavorable bias from the artist at hand. Beginning in the 1830’s, cameras provided a revolutionary solution by combining the advancements in optics and chemistry. Consequently, the new medium of photography was established and forever changed how history would be visually captured. Unlike other methods, photography

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.

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.

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

Photography gives you a small sample of reality, but these realities have been changed to what the photographer wants to present. However as Sontag stated, “Of course, photographs fill in the blanks in our mental pictures of the present and the past.” Pictures show proof that all of the history that we learn is true, but although it confirms that, pictures does not show us the entire picture of how people felt about the situation. For example, one might have a picture from WWII and show us the setting, but does that picture really show the feeling of the people? That is why we say that photography only goes as far as to how the photographer wants to show the

Photos are just recorded information and how it is presented is actually based on individual interpretation by the photographers themselves. It is not absolute reality because the viewers themselves are not there to witness the event; therefore it is not entirely factual. The meaning of a photo illustration is also dependent on viewers' individual views and assumption. As the old metaphor says, "is the glass of milk half full or half empty?"

The essay will make use of the works of photographic artists who engage in one of the two schools of photography, Pictorialism and Modernism. The artists that will be used for this essay are Paul Strand who has been selected for the Modernist development together with a Russian artistic photographer Alexander Rodchenko and As White remained rooted to Pictorialism, his stance on his methodology and set up in the 1920s and 1930s led to occurrence of the stirring up of quite a number of understudies to handle his visualization style which was fresh and innovative (White, Clarence H., Jr. and Peter C. Bunnell 1965). In the process of talking about the two schools of photography, Pictorialism and Modernism rather than focus on the clash and disagreements that occurred from Pictorialism and Modernism it is more suitable to examine the merits in both the method and styles used in the two schools of

Example #1: N. Scott Momaday describes shadows from clouds "that move upon the grain like water."

Photographs are re-collections of the past. This essay is about photography, memory, and history and addresses the relationship between photographic images and the need to remember; it is based on the notion that seeing is a prelude to historical knowledge and that understanding the past relies on the ability to imagine. At the same time, the role of thought and imagination in the production of society--as reflected in the earlier work of Louis Althusser (1970), Maurice Godelier (1984) and perhaps more significantly, Cornelis Castoriadis (1975), suggests yet another role for photography in the construction of a social and cultural reality. Photographs in capitalist societies contribute to the production of information and participate in the surveillance of the environment where their subjective and objective qualities are applied to the private uses of photographic images in the perpetuation of memory.

The article discusses the photographs that are used in newspapers and retained photography that is used to demonstrate what happened or what could be a result of a certain action. It starts out discussing an incident that happened in Boston in 1975.A photographer by the name of Stanley Forman was at an apartment fire hoping to take rescue shots of a young woman and her child being pulled to safety 5 stories high. He didn’t have a second thought of something could go wrong the fireman. It was such a casual matter he even stated “the fireman had a nice strong jaw and looked very brave.”

With the information at hand, Pare argues that it is easy for one to assume Fenton moved the cannonballs, but with everything he knows about the rest of Fenton’s photographs and career, it wouldn’t make a logical conclusion for him to have moved the cannonballs. Pare goes on to say that both images are powerful, with and without the cannonballs, however the image becomes a little more interesting with the cannonballs included. Either way both versions of the photograph demonstrate a chilling, silent expression of the silent horrors of war. Pare points out that the most interesting fact is that Fenton captured two images from the same viewpoint in the first place, this wasn’t something Fenton did as part of his normal

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).

Photography is a field that is steeped in ambiguity, it is an art form, a form of evidence both in scientific and legal processes, it is used heavily in advertising and also in journalism. Photojournalism relies on the “truth claim” of photography, that if a subject was photographed it existed in that way. Yet the majority of a photographer’s photos do not make it into the display whether in a magazine or exhibit. While showing the entirety of the photographer’s series might be argued to have more truth since it removes some of the curatorial process, photography’s power is found in showing a specific scene. Freezing time in a key moment to convey the overall feeling is effective for conveying a message, one can be impacted by the photograph. However photographs cannot express the story they capture on their own. Whether they are displayed in magazines or exhibits, photographs are accompanied by text giving the context of the situation. In the exhibit “The Making of an Argument” Russell Lord focuses on Gordon Park’s first feature for Time magazine, “Harlem Gang Leader”, to deconstruct the process from the photographs to the resulting magazine article. Taking into account the selection of photographs to fit a narrative and the relationship between the captions and the photographs. Using this initial analysis as a base I will be analyzing the editing and manipulation of photographs in “Harlem Gang Leader” to analyze not only Time’s argument but Lord’s, to prove photographic

Photographers were expected to be able to take these mind blowing pictures of the war in rapid action, but the truth is there technology back then wasn’t advanced enough to be able to produce these sort of images. The images took only minutes to develop but a huge

Typically, photographs are considered nothing more than tangible items that invoke nostalgia. Having a character ponder over a photo typically gives the image no more value than a McGuffin. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros (2000) on the other hand, asks the viewer to re-evaluate the concept of ‘the photograph’ both literally and figuratively throughout the film. The meaning of a ‘photograph’ can be considered the glue on this story; the symbol is dynamic enough to provide each character with a moment of reflection, and the audience a window into the subjective perspective at the peak of a character’s diegesis. Using the photograph loosely in this fashion allows it to be one of the key elements to tie together three radically different stories, despite the symbol’s lack of dedicated screen time.