Blog Post #2 2-20-2010
Every Saturday I read Us Weekly. Read is a term to be used lightly in this context, because what I am more so doing is scanning the images. For me, photographs are a quicker and easier way to provide information. In articles like the one in Us Weekly about Taylor Swift and Jake Gyllenhaal starting a romance, http://www.usmagazine.com/celebritynews/news/first-photos-jake-and-taylors-romantic-thanksgiving-day-stroll-2010112, the photos were a fast way to describe the new couple, as well as proof that the couple was actually seen together. Susan Sontag’s book On Photography describes how “photographs furnish evidence”(5). Sontag also notes that photographs “alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe"(3). Us Weekly is all about providing evidence of the life of celebrities as well as deciding that these are the people that are important enough to be photographed and placed in the public eye. Photographs play many other roles in my life through family photos, Facebook, and understanding significant events. Facebook is about photographs more than anything else. In order to keep up with my friends in college I look to see what they are doing in their photographs. When they tell me about a fun party over text, the proof lies in their photos. I look to see what they are wearing and how they look. Facebook has contributed to the vainness of my own society. Profile pictures are meant to be the best picture of yourself that you want to be the representative of you to the world. Before information your profile picture is what everyone sees. However, if there was no profile picture or photographs you would just have information. People want the whole package with Facebook, and it allows for us to see the visual and personality in one. However, today it is extremely easy to make both of them lies with the use of photo editing. Sontag considered photographs to be also used as a way of “memorializing the achievements of individuals considered as members of the family”(8). My dorm room is not full of writing about each of my friends and family, but pictures of me on graduation day with my parents and friends. My walls are covered with pictures of my Mom and Dad on special occasions, pictures of my theatre group in our Winter Musical, and pictures of all of my friends preparing for prom. Photographs are used as ways to remember something, with an exact image of how it happened. It is impossible to explain these events, the way a photo can capture them in a moment. Kracauer quotes "the photograph does not preserve the transparent aspects of an object but instead captures it as a spatial continuum from any one of a number of positions" and that is another difference of photos and print(53). Photographs provide no back story, no other information other than what you see at the exact moment. While I love to reminisce with my parents about photographs of me as a child, there is no way to truly understand what is going on at the time. Finally I look to photographs to find understanding in significant events that writing about them cannot do the same justice for. As the events of Hurricane Katrina occurred, I read about people’s experiences and read about the damage done. However, it was pictures like these, http://blog.lib.umn.edu/olso4158/architecture/Hurricane%2520Katrina%2520Response2%5B1%5D.jpg, that truly showed just how much damage was done. Pictures of the event were what sparked the most emotion, because of the shock I felt. The pictures put into reality, the events that I could not even imagine.
Compared to my relationship to photographs, print for me is a lot more intimate. When I decide I am actually going to read something, I sit down, usually isolated, hopefully in a quiet spot, and actually engage with the text. A picture takes a moment of my time, and while at the time the pictures make an impact, reading requires much more of my focus. It was fast to look at a picture of Katrina, but to actually read an article about the pain everyone was going through I had to sit down and be involved in the articles. Unlike pictures which require participation and sharing, print is a hot medium. This means it all consuming. Photographs are more of a collective media in my life. When I am on Facebook I am looking and commenting on other people’s pictures, interacting and talking about them with my friends. In US Weekly I discuss the trends I see in the images. In terms of family photos, I break them out at family parties to involve my family in laughing at how we used to look. To me, print is personal. I feel like pictures can be seen anywhere at anytime, but when I read I need to turn off my music, pause whatever I am watching, and go into a private space. I cannot read unless I have complete quiet and I believe that makes me a more engaged reader, when I actually get the chance to read. Even the newspaper or magazine articles I choose to read put me in an isolated reading zone. I do not necessarily think this means it is not a collective experience at all. I think the media I read connects me to a whole different community, a world of people I do not know exist reading the same thing I am reading and gaining the same knowledge I am. I also love to connect with others after I am done reading. To get others opinions on books read, or others interpretations of books gets me even more invested in my own thoughts.
I agree with McLuhan’s idea that “perhaps the most significant of the gifts of typography on man is that of detachment and noninvolvement-the power to act without reacting”(173). However, I believe it can be used for both print and photos. When I read and see pictures of current events, I feel like I know what is going on but it is important to remember that I am not actually as emotionally attached as those who are there. Print and photos both allow us to experience a certain event, but it allows us to do so in a mediated way. I never experienced Hurricane Katrina physically, so I almost feel bad of how emotionally effected I was by the experience, when I know it was detached compared to people physically being there. Photos and print differ greatly in how I take them in, but they are similar in how I use them to live an experience I cannot physically be involved in.
Work-Cited
Kracauer, Siegfried. The Mass Ornament. Harvard University Press, 2005. Print. 46-63.
McLuhan, Marshall. “The Printed Word: Architect of Nationalism.” Understanding Media:
The Extensions of Man. MIT Press, 1994. Print. 170-178.
Sontag, Susan. “In Plato’s Cave.” On Photography. New York: Picador, 1977. Print.
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I find it interesting when you wrote about looking to pictures of significant events to find understanding because in one of my other classes we were reading another essay by Sontag called "Regarding the Pain of Others" and it talks about war photography and how we could possibly relate to the suffering of victims in disastrous war zones. She also talks about how we are exposed to so much of this kind of photography that perhaps it has kind of made us numb or apathetic to such suffering. I think photography is powerful in stirring up different emotions and responses and especially when Hurricane Katrina hit, looking at all the photos certainly provoked incredible empathy within people and also caused a great deal of incentive to help out the hurricane victims because it gave us an awareness of what they were going through.
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