Photos: From Mapping Time and Space

Response: On Photography

Overall, this reading was a collection of what photography has become. It highlighted the many uses of what photography as a whole is. The total acceptance of photography as an art formed out of the demand for the documentation and the many purposes it fulfills. The industrial revolution sparked a whole new world full of demand. This article is proving the point that when photography as an art was so much rejected, the demand for it provided the perfect gateway into the art world.

Response: Ways of Seeing

Here are a few important points that thought were meaningful from this video:

A large part of seeing depends on habit of convention. Perspective makes the eye for the visible world. The way we see and interpret things can be directly affected by our own experiences and influences. As a viewer each individual will interpret what we see differently. Everything around the object affects the context, whether it is music or complete silence. Uninterrupted stillness and silence of a painting can be striking. The experience of the silence connects to the viewer to allow for an open interpretation.

The invention of the camera changed everything. We saw things that we didn’t see before, and it changed how we see it as well as what we choose to see. The camera is a means for reproduction. The days of pilgrimage are over, because of reproduction. The same paintings you would pilgrimage to can be hanging in your living room. The meaning of the painting no longer resides in the place of the painting. The meaning comes to you, in a way that news arrives.

Response: Camera Lucida

Response: Camera Lucida By: Roland Barthes

From this reading I pulled three quotations that I thought were powerful to me. As a photography major, I share a certain perspective on photographs and how they are perceived. The relationship between a photograph and the viewer, I believe, is a real connection of the mind, body and ones perception. A photograph takes multiple forms, but it simply captures what has been. The way a photographer sees the world is what each photograph expresses. It is up to the viewer to perceive the photograph to get that view. Although I cannot say that the photographers intensions will always get across, but he/she serves as a bridge to the viewer to spark a new exploration of thoughts and interpretations.

“The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.”

“The Photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been.”

“ This distinction is decisive. In front of a photograph, our consciousness does not necessarily take the nostalgic path of memory (how many photographs are outside of individual time), but for every photograph existing in the world, the path of certainty: the Photograph's essence is to ratify what it represents.”