Smoke and Mirrors: Manipulated Realities Photography is an art form that plays with the mind. Photographs are perhaps one of the most layered and contradictory objects we can see around us. They represent reality, but yet somehow they don’t - they don’t capture the whole of reality, rather just a snapshot of it. There is always a constant battle going on between the two photographic considerations: make the photographed object look as beautiful as possible or tell the truth. What a picture finally really shows is never the exact situation as it really was, but it proves to somehow represent it. This treacherous and ambiguous relationship with reality is what makes photography interesting, yet so astounding; it raises questions about the …show more content…
van den Born’s “social experiment” makes one wonder if actually going to South East Asia for 5 weeks would have been a more worthwhile endeavor, but one would be remiss in thinking so. Van den Born states that her trip was actually a school project meant to showcase how Facebook doesn 't accurately reflect what people are genuinely doing or how they are living. Speaking to media in her home country, she said: “I did this to show people that we filter and manipulate what we show on social media, and that we create an online world which reality can no longer meet. My goal was to prove how common and easy it is to distort reality. Everybody knows that pictures of models are manipulated. But we often overlook the fact that we manipulate reality also in our own lives.” Ultimately, van den Born’s project addresses the definition of "reality." It is no doubt that people are constantly sharing images from their vacations and daily lives, but, her project begs the question, how much of it is real? While we necessarily don’t spend hours in Photoshop for sharing ordinary photos; however, we are building, rather fabricating, our own little story that we choose to post on social media to share with the
I found out that on november 18,1861 james mason and john Slidell sailed from 1781,1871 and while they were sailing they were intercepted by the USS San Jacinto.I found out that Jefferson Davis the President of the confederate states of America had despatched two envoys the british captured the envoys.and on 1861 they were captured by the U.S,great britain accused the united states for violating the british neutrality wich resulted to the civil war. In October 1861 mason and Slidell slipped through U.S navel blockade and left Charleston,south carolina to go to cuba. The Trent affair involving the civil war doctrine of freedom wich led to the war between the U.S
Teju Cole, in his essay “Against Neutrality,” dissected the tones behind photography- which he believes are thought of as unbiased towards the subject. The power of words and of photos is crucial to Cole’s essay. He states that images can “make a grim situation palatable” because of the photographer’s craftiness in selection (Cole 1). To anyone who isn’t an experienced photographer these tricks can be hard to see but Cole provides further insight from the historian, John Edwin Mason. Expectantly, Mason sheds light behind the misconception on photography, how the “manipulation in photography isn’t really about Photoshop or darkroom tricks”, but the style, angle and other aspects of taking photos (Cole 1).
Ever since the camera was invented in 1839, the very nature of photography has been questioned. With the increasing advent of photographic technology, photography has become an egalitarian expression of society and community. With one press of a button, an image is captured for eternity, bringing to question the inherent artistic quality of photographs. If we can so quickly capture an image, can this be deemed art? Art is to promote fantasy, and dream, to incite anger and joy. Thus, surely photography is an art, as seen through its capturing of beautiful verdant landscapes, and the horrendous
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
No matter it’s effect, photography was and is very pivotal throughout society. Photography can be a beautiful but yet haunting form of art. It displays an image which is characterizing
“Photography can never grow up if it imitates some other medium. It has to walk alone; it has to be itself.” – Berenice Abbott.
Jessica Yadegaran in “Making Sense of Selfies: Taking Selfies Feels Problematic Because We Aren’t Used To Them” explores two elements of the language of photography, namely the photographic attributes and the meaning.
A world without photography seems merely impossible to the modern age humans. Photography is seen throughout our everyday lives, from the television, to smartphones, and on our computers, it seems impossible to avoid it. But why would we want to? Photography is a vision, a memory, a moment captured in time that makes it possible for humans to share these moments with others. But more than times than not, these moments, visions, photographs are altered, manipulated, and distorted to influence, and change the audience’s view. By analyzing the many methods the photographer’s ways of manipulating, altering, and the distortion of the truth of their works, one can conclude that not everything shown is accurate and often overlooked by the
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 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.
Now, with technology literally at our fingertips, we tend to live and breathe in a virtual realm. Creating any person we want, allowing any emotion to be unfiltered, and having no accountability to our actions, the perceived box of who we can be is ever changing. As our dependency upon this fake world increases, we’ll continually lose ourselves to reality, eventually losing who we actually are, losing such things as morals and individualism. Technology is reshaping us into cyborgs, not unique people but robotic beings found throughout the masses. Kristen Ostrenga, a young girl feeling the pressure to be apart of this mass sameness, created for herself a new person on social media.
The author Andrew Leonard has said "We've offered up every detail of our lives to advertiser manipulation, voluntarily embraced a panopticonic existence of constant surveillance, and supinely allowed a bunch of techno-utopian Silicon Valley companies to guide and shape our behavior."(Leonard). In this review the author agrees with Silverman about being under constant surveillance, he also agrees with Silverman that we should constantly be alert about the data that we put on social media as in this statement "Silverman is correct: It is critical that we monitor and understand the consequences of "the data-ization of the digital self." "(Leonard). Andrew does not agree with Silverman on the point "Photos become less about memorializing a moment than communicating the reality of that moment to others,"(Silverman, 55). Andres says that “Before social media, you could argue that the modern world specialized in tearing us apart, in atomizing the relationships that once bound societies together. Now we've got something that helps lace the grand tapestry back together. This is not a bad thing” (Leonard). In a way Andrew finds something good in Social
Photography has always been a contentious fine art used by artists to capture art. Concerns have been raised to whether photography should be considered an art or a science, since both are incorporated to create “art”. Photography was considered more true to reality.
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
But just as every painting is not a piece of artwork, Demachy argued that not every photograph could be art either. Instead, he proposed that we look beyond mediums to see how artworks share a kinship of sorts in their ability to find beauty in the “ugly and commonplace” by being a “transcription...of nature.” As Demachy points out, the rise of popular photography should not undermine photography’s potential for art making, just as the availability of charcoal and paint sets had not threaten painting’s