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!)