On Photography by Susan Sontag

On photography by Susan Sontag is a piece written to make you step back and realize what photography really is. Photography furnishes evidence, is a cheep sentimental object and gives us an opportunity to step back and take in a moment while taking a picture. Many people read literature but don't "believe" it until they see a picture. This is true with many other things like gossip, someone saying they saw a famous person or when someone says they saw something crazy like a three eyed person. Photography gives us the ability to hold the whole world in our heads. We can hold our children, parents and friends in our hands. While being light, cheep and easy to carry around. Taking a picture also makes you really appreciate the moment. You stop and take in the moment, framing it, studying it and enjoying it.

Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes has a lot of interesting thoughts. A thought of Roland Barthes's that stood out to me was "It is often said that it was the painter who invented Photography ", this is a thought that I thought before reading this and still do. Barthes on the other hand believes that it was the chemist, which is true but the painter invented the frame, the shape and the actual art of capturing a moment.

Another quote I liked was "The Photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been." This is a beautiful quote, but not true, which kind of sucks. It would be cool to believe everything you see but now a days we see an amazing picture and assume it has been photo shopped.

Ways of Seeing, Episode 1: Psychological Aspects

The Ways of Seeing talks about how photography changed the world. The man in the film talks about how with cameras we see things we don't really see, which is ironically true.

Reading John Szarkowski's  "The Photographer's Eye" containing what he considers five main issues of photography, I found that a few were very helpful when beginning photography for the first time. The introduction was also very insightful, one quote he used was by Baudelaire, he said, "This industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art's most mortal enemy." I always half thought this theory, that photography took away from art for example painting a scenery to just taking a picture. This is not true all the time though, some photographers are true artist that can really capture a moment with a picture but it takes an accumulation of understanding the detail, the subject, timing, vantage point and choosing just the right frame. Understanding the detail was one of the more interesting issues to me, Szarkowski said that "If photography could not be read as stories, they could be read as symbols." Reading that sentence made me think to my American History class in high school where my teacher told us that during WWII the newspapers controlled the public with simply pictures. John Szarkowski must have had a similar recognition with WWII because he also quoted a photographer from that time period, Robert Capa, who said "If your pictures aren't good enough you're not close enough." The frame was also an issue that structs me, I never realized that photographers have to make such a hard decision, to decide what should be in from out. Time was the most philosophical issue he stated. Szarkowski said "Photography alludes to the past and the future only in so far as they exist in the present, the past through its surviving relics, the future though prophecy visible in the present."