The Potato : A Potato Hit My Mom

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.

To begin with, description is utilized to show that pictures are worth more than words. In Lange’s image, the woman looks exhausted and the children seem saddened. Viewers of the image see this by their facial expressions. For instance, two of the children are looking away from the photographer and the woman has no smile on her face. Moreover, onlookers observe how people lived during the Great Depression in the west coast. Viewers of the image see this by their clothing. For example, the woman and children are wearing tattered, dirty clothing. The overall picture represents what people went through during the Great Depression without ever telling the audience it was taken during this

A man may recognize himself in his father, grandfather, great grandfather and uncles faces, men who no longer exist. Photographs provide evidence of their lives, and the changes through time. As someone who enjoys studying people, and culture, the art of Photography has capture moments of absolute joy, the birth of a child, marriage, birthday celebrations. It can be evidence of war crimes, and genocide, destruction and

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

The authors tell the reader that a picture must be interpreted like an essay or piece of writing. The motive and goal of the author or photographer must be figured out.

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

It was a cloudy Sunday morning and I was about eight years old. I was too young to remember everything from my childhood but not too young to remember this experience that emotionally and mentally disturbed me. My mom and aunt thought it would be a good idea to go get donuts for breakfast. So, we proceeded down the street to our local donut shop in Carlsbad. The fact that it was Sunday made the waiting line twice as long so I stood there patiently while I staring out the window. I could hear my mom and my aunts’ conversation, as I stood right next to them. Because they were born and raised in Mexico, they knew little English and therefore, they communicated within each other in their preferred language, which was Spanish. Everything was going

Photos can be an illustrative material object to shape a story. But photos just reflect upon our memories and try to relate to the overall useless piece of paper. Photos may have value but they are essentially paper and just that. Photos are meaningless because each person just brings his own mental state of mind to the picture.

The photograph is a very powerful medium. The French painter Paul Delaroche exclaimed upon seeing an early photograph “from now on, painting is dead!” (Sayre, 2000). Many critics did not take photography seriously as a legitimate art form until the 20th century. With the

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.

Sontag claims that “photography is, a social rite, but it can also be a defense against anxiety and a tool of power (page 130).” She backs her claim by stating “photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possessions of space in which they are insecure.” (Sontag page 131). In other words, having pictures allows people to tell stories that may not be exactly true. I agree with Sontag because I have witnessed and experienced how pictures can hurt someone emotionally while empowering others.

The summer of my sophomore year, my parents decided to take my brother and me to visit La Palma, Tamasopo, San Luis Potosi, México, the “pueblo” (town) where my father blossomed. I have always liked going to see my grandparents and tell them my stories about life in what they call “el otro lado” (the other side). Although I have already gone there dozens of times, I was excited for this trip. I longed to walk down the dirt roads, smell the authentic Mexican cooking that my grandmother makes to help us feel at home, the “huapangos” (a style of Mexican music, originated in La Huasteca, a region of San Luis Potosi) that my grandfather blasts to drown out the sound of the morning rooster, and with my Coolpix 530 camera in hand, I was ready to capture and save the beauty of the Mexican lifestyle.

Representation and the critique of ideology apply to photojournalism because a photo does not exist in isolation. This means that a photo always has more meaning than what is shown. A camera only captures what is in front of the lens, not around or behind it, therefore there is always more to the story than one image can portray. A photo also has different

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).