SAY CHEESE!
the association of meaning to photography as an art form and as a social right.
written by naomi✿✿✿
When you take a picture - whether it's on your digital camera, professional camera or your cell phone, do you ever think about why you decided to capture that moment in time. Do you believe that what you see is exactly what you get in photographs? Do images really say a thousand words? If they do, are those words perfectly received by all viewers of your image and do those words change with time?
I don’t really know the answer to these questions either, and to be honest they kind of contribute to the esoteric universality of photography. It shouldn't be imperative for viewers to know the exact intent behind an image, especially since we’re going to place our own narrative on it anyway.
This is essentially what the beauty of photography is; ambiguity. A constantly evolving image has many meanings, as its manipulation cannot weave its intricacies to one sole interpretation.
Susan Sontag’s In Plato’s Cave from the book: On Photography speaks of photography using many definitions. She discloses two modes of photography- as an art form and as a social right. She believes photography is a reflection of reality and is construed to show parallelity to Plato’s Cove. Where the shadows of the exterior world reflect only certain pieces of the truth.
“To collect photographs is to collect the world”, she says as she speaks of the exploratory notions of “what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe” (Sontag, 3). But there are complexities that have made modern photography mean much more than that. An image can be manipulated into the mere idea of truth.
“But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience” (Sontag, 6)
Photography as an art form reflects photos in the form of expression and are an interpretation of the artist's reality. We see what they want us to see but associate our own meaning to it. While photographers may be concerned with capturing reality, the idea of satisfying niche imperatives of their own intrigue and consciousness will always hone itself into the photograph. It is a means of converting image into experience, experiences that have the ability to be more simple than we think.
PEACEFUL ILLUSTRATIONS PRESERVE FLEETING MOMENTS OF EVERYDAY LIFE -ELFIE THOMAS
In this sense the truth is stranger than fiction, because it’s undetermined. Photographic art in itself can’t always be limited to reality if we want it to create narratives that evoke thought and evolving processes.
Although photography claims to capture the essence of reality and we’re corrupted to deem it as the truth, we often forget that it can also be an interpretation of someone else’s feelings and sensibilities.
Sontag reminds us that today’s photographs are just pieces of the truth. Daily were shown so many different pictures of people we don’t know, in places we’ve never been before, unknowing of the intent behind the screen. We construct our own reality with all of this unknown information, living in our own interpretation of images, resulting in a photographic facade of manipulated image.
Art as a social right recognizes photography as an event in itself and not an encounter between the photographer and an event. Sontag says it is a peremptory right to invade these spaces and have something else be brought into the world. Think about it. When an event ends, the pictures still exist and create a small element of another world. Pictures will outlive all of humanity.
In recent years, we see picture taking becoming more of a casual activity of amusement. And as Sontag shares…
“Like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety,and a tool of power” (Sontag, 8).
I’ve developed a sort of ambivalence to her theory. It makes me wonder how our brains have evolved to support this acquisition of photography, as people will always consciously see what they expect and not what violates their expectations.
Sontag resonates with this towards the end of her piece, where she has a rant about the aesthetic notions of consumerism that photography has now reached, where societal expectations that objectify human life is at the forefront of pleasurable photographs (Sontag, 24). Despite her ferocity she ultimately concludes that...
"Today everything exists to end in a photograph" (Sontag, 24).
lol... toodles for now! ✿✿✿
