Again, I was sadly unable to make this class, but it is understood the class activity involved getting more hands-on with a camera and really learning how each component works. The exerts from the reading of the week, ‘On Photography’ by Susan Sontag describes the nature of realism in photography, though it is often limited by other factors, “whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph –  any photograph – seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects” (Sontag, 1977). It describes the way photography is an attempt to capture the real-world, but it is often “haunted” by taste and integrity. I find this to be a very interesting argument, although photographs seem more authentic and rawer than a painting or other art form, it is often skewed to be visually appealing. I can see examples of this in modern life, if I am posting a picture from a holiday, I want to post a picture that is visually pleasing whether it really appears this way or not; “photographs will offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had.” (Sontag, 1977).

I also resonated with Sontag’s argument about nostalgia. Photographs and cameras capture moments in time, memories, and memoirs of the world we live in and people we know. Photos allow us to capture something that has meaning to us, and cannot be taken away from the photo once it has been taken, becoming ‘immortal’; “cameras began duplicating the world at that moment when the human landscape started to undergo a vertiginous rate of change: when an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time, a device is available to record what is disappearing.” (Sontag, 1977).

REFERENCES:

Sontag, Susan 1977, On Photography, New York Picador.

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