Photos alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at.
To collect photos is to collect the world.
Photographs are really experience captured.
p.4 To photograph is to appropriate the thing being photographed.
Photos, more than print, turn the world into mental objects.
Photos get lost, bought, sold, become valuable....
p.5 Photos furnish evidence. -- they allow states to survey and control their citizens.
Photos justify: it is proof that a thing happened. (The photo may distort, but always the presumption a thing exists)
p6. Photos appear to be more transparent than painting or writing, but "the work photographers do is no exception to the shady commerce between art and truth." *Photos always owe to photographer's taste and conscience.
--Photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects
-- there is a sense in which photos capture reality, but photos are actually as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings.
p.7 There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.
--Camera's make it possible to look at the world as a set of potential photographs.
--a promise inherent in photography: to democratize all images by translating them into images.
p. 8 recently, photography has become as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing -- it is a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.
--used first to memorialize achievements: Cameras go with family life.
--through photos, a family constructs a chronicle of itself: "a portable kit of images" -- doesn't matter what is photographed, as long as the photos are cherished.
--photography becomes a rite of family life just when...the institution of family starts "undergoing radical surgery."
p. 9 a family's photo album may be all that remains of the extended family
photography develops alongside the notion of TOURISM
photos prove trip was made, and fun was had
the camera makes the experience "real" : it "certifies" experience, the image becomes a souvenir
travel becomes a strategy for taking pictures
p.10 you put the camera btwn yourself and whatever remarkable thing/event you encounter
it's like a kind of WORK: gives the tourist something to do
p.11 "Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyueristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events"
(VOYEUR: literally means "pleasure in looking," often has a sexual connotation)
--picture talking is an event in itself, gives the photographer the right to interfere with invade, ignore, any other situation
--suggests that time consists of interesting events...this, in turn makes it easy to feel that any event should be allowed to continue***
Omayra Sánchez was one of the 25,000 victims of the Nevado del Ruiz (Colombia) volcano which erupted on November 14, 1985. The 13-year old had been trapped in water and concrete for 3 days. The picture was taken shortly before she died and it caused controversy due to the photographer’s work and the Colombian government’s inaction in the midst of the tragedy, when it was published worldwide after the young girl’s death.
--photography is essentially an act of non-intervention
p.12, using a camera is still a form of participation. it encourages whatever is going on to keep happening, even when that thing is another person's pain.
p. 13, "naughty subjects are harder to find these days"
p. 14, "like a car, the camera is sold as a predatory weapon" camera's don;t actually kill, but fulfill the fantasy of being able to kill
--but, to photograph is to violate by seeing someone as they never see themselves, turning them into objects that can be symbolically possessed "a soft murder"
p.15 cameras used instead of guns on safaris: instead of needing guns to be protected from nature, now nature needs protection form people.
--pictures and nostalgia
NOSTALGIA: The term nostalgia describes a yearning for the past, often in idealized form.[1] The word is a learned formation of a Greek compounds, consisting of νόστος, nóstos, "returning home", a Homeric word, and ἄλγος, álgos, "pain" or "ache". "the good old days"
--photos make the world mysterious, their subjects are touched with pathos
"To take a photo is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability"
p.16 photos of torn down neighborhoods give us the feeling of some relation to the past...
a sense of the unattainable in photos: photos are the attempt to lay claim to another reality "lover's photo in a wallet"
p. 17 Photography and moral impulse: photos can't create consciousness they can only add to it. We become desensitized to them over time.
photos are more memorable than video/film b/c they are neat slices of time
p.19 photos shock insofar as they show something novel....the ante keeps getting raised.
p20: "To suffer is one thing. To live with the images of suffering is another." This can corrupt sympathy.
"Images anesthetize"
repeated exposure makes an image less real
p.21 Time positions most photographs at the level of art. (WHY?)
photography coincides with bureaucratic ways of running society
p.22: photos are valued b/c they give information, but the info they give is actually "fiction." Anything can be separated, or brought together....
p.23: the world becomes a series of particles, denies interconnectedness.
the wisdom of the photo is to think beyond its surface...photos, by themselves, can't explain anything.
photos are the opposite of understanding, they don't show how things FUNCTION
p.24 the limit of photographic knowledge is that it can never be ethical or political: "knowledge at bargain prices"
makes us feel the world is more available than it really is
"aesthetic consumerism"
an experience becomes identical with with taking a photograph of it
"today everything exists to end in a photograph"
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