Post #10: Using Quotes

One hallmark of advanced writing is the effectiveness with which one uses another person's words and ideas.  There are three ways to accomplish this: summary, paraphrase, and direct quote.  To summarize or paraphrase means to keep the author's ideas but to reconstruct them in your own language, syntax, and voice (while giving attribution to the original author, of course).  To directly quote a source is to keep the author's ideas and words (if the language is vivid enough to be worth keeping).  However, when using a direct quote, writers should avoid free-standing quotes (also known as dropped, floating, or cut-and-pasted quotes).  A free-standing quote is a quote that a writer uses without introduction or integration, and it will disrupt the writer's own tone and flow.

There are three ways of introducing quotes to prevent them from being free-standing.

1.  Use a simple introductory phrase, like "According to" or "So-and-so argues."  This method emphasizes the author, so a writer would use this when he or she wants to emphasize the person as an expert or someone offering testimony.

Here's an example.

According to Siegfried Kracauer, "While time is not part of the photograph like the smile or the chignon, the photograph itself, so it seems to them, is a representation of time" (424).

2.  Write your own sentence, then use a quote (introduced with a colon) that functions as evidence or demonstration of your sentence's ideas.  Be sure your sentence is a complete sentence; otherwise, the sentence becomes a fragment.  This method works most effectively for using source material as evidence for the writer's own claims.

Here's an example.

In certain ways, a photograph functions as a more reliable witness than our own memory: "Memory encompasses neither the entire spatial appearance nor the entire temporal course of an event. Compared to photography memory's records are full of gaps" (Kracauer 425).

3.  Instead of introducing the entire quote, integrate pieces (words, phrases, or clauses) into the context of the writer's own syntax.  This method works best to synthesize ideas and to create a smooth flow.

Here's an example.

When we reduce our experience of the world to collecting photographs, we become guilty of the "warehousing of nature" (Kracauer 435) and loved ones in dusty albums as forgotten souvenirs.

Your assignment:

A.  Find three quotes from Susan Sontag's On Photography that you will use in your essay.

B.  Introduce those quotes and/or incorporate them into a sentence of your own that you will use in your essay.

C.  Post those three sentences to the blog.

Post #9: Introductions

As we briefly discussed during our Saturday orientation, effective introductions are comprised of three basic parts: hook, context, thesis.

1.  The hook (also known as the lead, the attention-grabber, and the opening) is designed to catch the reader's attention and get him/her thinking about your essay's topic.  These hooks should be original (avoid cliches!), relevant (stay on topic!), and interesting (don't be boring!) and can may take the form of a question, direct quote, definition, anecdote, description, fact/statistic, or example.

2.  The second part of the introduction is when the writer establishes background and context.  In other words, this is when the writer should introduce and explain the broad topic as well as any specific information needed in order to understand the writer's argument.

3.  The thesis is the concise distillation of that argument.  This is where the author makes his or her claim about the topic at hand and implies (if not explicitly stating) the reasons for that claim.

How long should an introduction be?  That depends on the length of the overall essay.  For a book-length work, the introduction might be a full chapter.  For a short response, the introduction might be one long sentence.

For your essay, which needs to be at least four full pages of analysis, you should probably aim for an introduction somewhere between 1/2 page and one full page (typed, double-spaced).

For this post, answer the following questions:

1.  What form of a hook will you choose?  Will you ask a question?  Open with a quote?  Another option?

2.  What ideas will you establish in the section for background/context? (For this blog, you can just list these ideas).

3.  What is your thesis?  (Write the thesis statement).

Post #8: Your First Essay

Now that you have read and thought about Susan Sontag's views of photography, it is time to craft your own meditation, analysis, and argument.

In terms of your essay's overall topic, your thesis should answer a simple question: "What can/does/should a photograph do?"

When you explore this topic, I want you to consider how a photograph is both an object and a tool and how its utility changes depending on context and intent.  For example, we see photographs in museums, in advertising, in news stories, on the walls of our homes, and on our driver's licenses and mugshots.

As you develop this essay, use Sontag's ideas (and direct quotes from her essays) as support for your claims, and use specific photographs (from your fellow classmates, from Slate's Behold blog, and from your own life) as examples.

To help you generate ideas and plan an overall structure, use the nine rhetorical modes for guidance.  These modes are methods of structuring and presenting information and will keep you focused (and will help you avoid writer's block).

Argument: Make an assertion, and support that assertion through reasons and evidence.

Description: Illustrate an object or idea by providing specific imagery (such as visual details) or figurative language (such as metaphors).

Definition: Specify the essential qualities of an object or idea.

Exemplification: Provide examples.

Narration: Tell a story.

Compare/Contrast: Detail similarities and differences.

Cause/Effect: Detail the causes (and/or effects).

Process Analysis: Explain how to do something or how something was done.

Division / Classification: Break an idea down into categories, and then label each category.

These rhetorical modes often work in conjunction with one another.  For example, a writer using division/classification would probably find him/herself transitioning from there into exemplification.

Your essay does not need to use all nine rhetorical modes; rather, think in terms of what you want each paragraph or section of your essay to accomplish.

This essay needs to be at least four pages long, so assuming your introduction is 1/2 page and your conclusion is 1/2 page, you will need to have at least three pages of body paragraphs.  Assuming that your body paragraphs will be well-developed, that will probably work out to somewhere between four and six body paragraphs.

For this post, provide a rough outline of what each of these body paragraphs will do.

For example, if I were writing this essay, I might want to explore how bureaucracies use photographs, so...

Body Paragraph 1: Division/Classification.  I will explore how bureaucracies (such as the judicial system, the educational system, and the health care system) use photographs.  I will explore both the types of bureaucracies as well as the various purposes/functions of photography in those contexts.  I think I'll have a lot to say in this section, so this might end up being more than one body paragraph...

Body Paragraph 2:
Body Paragraph 3:
Body Paragraph 4:
Body Paragraph 5:

If you get stuck and can't think of what to say, read what your fellow students have written, and feel free to steal their ideas.  First of all, they won't mind, and second, when you actually write the essay, it will turn out completely different anyway.

Post #7: The Image World

Sontag argues that photography has a paradoxical relation to reality in that "It offers, in one easy, habit-forming activity, both participation and alienation in our own lives and those of others--allowing us to participate while confirming alienation" (167).  In other words, these photographs A) seem to allow us to understand and vicariously experience the event being photographed while B) simultaneously reaffirming that we are separate from that experience, that we are audience and separate from a reality in which others are the participants.

For this post, explain how these ideas apply to the works of Michelle Frankfurter or Kris Graves.

Post #6: Photographic Evangels

One essential aspect of photography is its capacity to defamiliarize the ordinary, to make us re-see and re-evaluate what we would normally overlook and take for granted.  As Sontag writes, "Just to show something, anything, in the photographic view is to show that it is hidden [...] the familiar, rendered by a sensitive use of the camera, will thereby become mysterious" (121).

Explain how this idea helps us understand the work of Irina Werning's series Back to the Future, whose photographs also form the visuals for the following music video by Feist.

Post #5: The Heroism of Vision

For this entry,

A) first briefly explain (in a few sentences) the following two quotes.

1) "The history of photography could be recapitulated as the struggle between two different imperatives: beautification, which comes from the fine arts, and truth-telling [... for] the photographer was supposed to unmask hypocrisy and combat ignorance" (Sontag 86).

2)  "Despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitve relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment" (Sontag 111).

B) then (in a paragraph) explain how the photographs of Carl Corey either embody or argue against Sontag's ideas.

Photographs from Your Realities

Y. Torres's "Skepticism"

H. Lee's "Before"

R. Ilodibia's "New Beginning"

E. Mullins's "Take Home Exams"

J. Cezar's "Eye See the City"

M. Robleto's "Being Surrounded by Nature"

S. Coodey's "Progress"

J. Camacho's "My Days"

J. Penuelas's "Sustenance"

E. Parks's "My Life"

J. Reyes's "Picture Perfect"

M. Phillips's "Ice Cream Date"

E. Worley's "Only Reality"

G. Bolanos's "Techno Inferno"

V. Basurto's "Spongy Bone"

J. Bravo's "Individualism"

S. Tamayo's "Family Reality"

Post #4: Melancholy Objects

In "Melancholy Objects," Sontag explores the relationship of photography and our understanding of the past.  In terms of this essay, focus on these four quotes:

1) "Picture-taking serves a high purpose: uncovering a hidden truth, conserving a vanishing past" (56).

2) "But essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own" (57)

3) "A photograph is only a fragment, and with the passage of time its moorings come unstuck" (71)

4) "The lure of photographs, their hold on us, is that they offer at one and the same time a connoisseur's relation to the world and a promiscuous acceptance of the world" (81)

In terms of this blog response, you have three tasks:

1.  In a short paragraph, explain how the work of Nick Brandt epitomizes one of the four quotes above.

2.  In a short paragraph, explain how the work of Stacy Kranitz epitomizes a different one of the four quotes above.

3.  E-mail me a photograph (of which you are the photographer) that features an aspect of your 'reality.'  I am going to post these photographs online, so don't send me a photograph that you don't want the world to see.

Post #3: "America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly"

In her essay "America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly," Susan Sontag analyzes the photographs of Diane Arbus (examples of which can be seen here); Sontag describes Arbus's process as photographing "people in various degrees of unconscious or unaware relation to their pain, their ugliness" (36). Sontag ends her essay be making a larger point, that these photographs illustrate an American collective melancholy and depression.

For this blog entry, write a paragraph that answers this question:

In a world in which people are suffering, what good can come of artists like Diane Arbus or photojournalists like Joey O'Loughlin taking artistic photographs and having exhibitions of people at their least glamorous, their least "presentable" moments?

Post #2: "In Plato's Cave"

"In Plato's Cave" is one of Susan Sontag's most famous works of photography criticism in which she makes many philosophical assertions about our relationship between photography and our understanding of the world.  For this post, find one interesting quote, post it, and explain why it is interesting.  Try to provide an example from "real-life" in your discussion.

The one catch is that you cannot repeat a quote that someone else has already taken, so be sure to read the previous posts.

For example, (and now you can't take this quote)...

Sontag's assertion that "Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire" (4) finds clearest expression in the use of photography in advertising.  These advertisements use photographs to promise a version of reality that can be ours but only if we buy the specified product; we can jump like Michael Jordan is jumping in this photograph but only if we buy the same brand of Nikes.  On a more personal level, we make these "miniatures of reality" when we use Instagram to document our meals ("See what I ate today!) or --again-- our newest shoe purchase ("Check out my new Chacos!  Now I'm ready be a hiker!)