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Susan sontag photography essay
Susan sontag photography essay
Susan sontag photography essay
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Sontag Essay-Qualify
Susan Sontag’s essay on how photography has limited people’s understanding of the world contains many interesting points that can be agreeable while at the same time having few that I tend to disagree with. Photography can be good and bad; it can open our minds up to new cultures and experiences through its imagery. However, at the same time it can limit our understanding of the world around us and of the world around the image it is portraying.
Sontag makes the statement that the camera’s rendering of reality must always hide more that it discloses. This may be true in some situations but does not necessarily apply to them all. Sontag is correct in making this statement when you apply it the way she did through her example of the photography of Krupp Works and how it shows us only a factory. When we look at this photograph, it explains to us nothing about Krupp Works. With no additional knowledge of the factory and no time effects applied to the photograph we are unable to comprehend what goes on inside Krupp Works in its entirety. The photograph only...
Having such an image before our eyes, often we fail to recognize the message it is trying to display from a certain point of view. Through Clark’s statement, it is evident that a photograph holds a graphic message, which mirrors the representation of our way of thinking with the world sights, which therefore engages other
The poem “Extended Development” by Sarah Kay explores the ways in which the art of photography has changed throughout time, yet still remains a highly important and influential hobby. More specifically, how photography is an important aspect in each member of the speaker’s family. By using allusions, characterization, and imagery, Kay explores how the art of photography has changed throughout time.
In “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop, the narrator attempts to understand the relationship between humans and nature and finds herself concluding that they are intertwined due to humans’ underlying need to take away from nature, whether through the act of poetic imagination or through the exploitation and contamination of nature. Bishop’s view of nature changes from one where it is an unknown, mysterious, and fearful presence that is antagonistic, to one that characterizes nature as being resilient when faced against harm and often victimized by people. Mary Oliver’s poem also titled “The Fish” offers a response to Bishop’s idea that people are harming nature, by providing another reason as to why people are harming nature, which is due to how people are unable to view nature as something that exists and goes beyond the purpose of serving human needs and offers a different interpretation of the relationship between man and nature. Oliver believes that nature serves as subsidence for humans, both physically and spiritually. Unlike Bishop who finds peace through understanding her role in nature’s plight and acceptance at the merging between the natural and human worlds, Oliver finds that through the literal act of consuming nature can she obtain a form of empowerment that allows her to become one with nature.
In the essay “Why We Take Pictures” by Susan Sontag, she argues that taking photos can be a tool of power and sometimes even a defense against anxiety(353). Taking pictures can be a great source of power, according to Sontag. The photographer has the power to show what they want and people can choose whether or not to be in the photo. Sontag uses the example of a family photo; as some family photos portray the family being happy, many people cannot see that the family might not actually be as happy as they look. Sontag also uses examples like nuclear families and traveling in order to enforce her claims about picture taking. In a nuclear family, Sontag believes that taking a picture of that family can help relieve some anxiety because people
If Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is akin to a bel canto diva, moving her voice in ornate, wispy, origami shapes with very little forcefulness--without, in keeping with the classic test of bel canto mastery, "bending the flame" (which could account for the "thinness" my professor once complained of as we discussed Sedgwick's buoyantly clever and even hallucinatory "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl," a psychotic triumph that proves you can read your own erotomania between the lines of a text and "get off," as it were, or "get by")--then Sontag is akin to a Broadway belter in the Ethel Merman or Patti LuPone tradition: all forcefulness, her every phrase canon-packed and released at a hair-whipping, face-flattening full blast (Stark 105). If you read her in the afternoon, you must cancel your evening plans to get the knots out of your hair.
Fifty years on from Susan Sontag’s innovative Essay “The Imagination of Disaster”, which incorporates the use of disaster films as analogies to argue that “from a psychological point of view, the imagination of disaster does not greatly differ from one period in history to another”, but on the contrary “from a political and moral point of view, it does”, Jean Baudrillard exchanges a similar set of concerns in his more recent essay ‘The mirror of terrorism’. He forms his essay on the ideas that the Western media is becoming the basis to advance how we are entering “the era of simulation and hyperreality” with “reality TV”. John C. Gilmour’s ‘Fire on the earth’, also relevant to Sontang and Stockhausen’s bald claims, contends that Anselm Kiefer, a german sculpture and painter, seeks to
Sontag, Susan. "Essay | Photography Enhances Our Understanding of the World." BookRags. BookRags. Web. 15 Apr. 2014.
Photography allows us to maintain memories and relish them whenever we desire. Although some advocates might argue that people are no longer enjoying experiences instead taking more pictures, in the essay, “Why We Take Pictures”, by Susan Sontag, she conflates that photography can be used as a defense against anxiety and a tool of empowerment. I agree with Sontag on the significance of photographs and how it allows us to store a part of our extended relatives so we are able to hold on the memories of family. Therefore, we must appreciate how photography allows us to manage anxiety, express feelings and remember our loved ones.
“Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing, which means that, 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). After reading this quote in my head multiple times, I started to realize that people use it for different purposes. When I took a photography class in college, it was under the category “art.” Which made me think of it as a form of art, when there are so many other ways to view photography. Sontag changed my opinion about photography after further interpreting her quote because to have a camera in our hand, being able to capture the world through our lens is to have a tool of
A picture is more than just a piece of time captured within a light-sensitive emulsion, it is an experience one has whose story is told through an enchanting image. I photograph the world in the ways I see it. Every curious angle, vibrant color, and abnormal subject makes me think, and want to spark someone else’s thought process. The photographs in this work were not chosen by me, but by the reactions each image received when looked at. If a photo was merely glanced at or given a casual compliment, then I didn’t feel it was strong enough a work, but if one was to stop somebody, and be studied in curiosity, or question, then the picture was right to be chosen.
Infamous: Second Son is an open world, action-adventure video game. Developed by Sucker Punch Productions and published by Sony Computer Entertainment for the PlayStation 4. The story follows the protagonist Delsin Rowe; Delsin is your average day hooligan who is a burden to his older brother who happens to be a police officer. Over the course of the game, Delsin acquires various different superpowers which will eventually allow him save the people from his village and get revenge for them.
Death is a photography." And she also said that :" “We no longer study the art of dying, a regular discipline and hygiene in older cultures; but all eyes, at rest, contain that knowledge. The body knows. And the camera shows, inexorably.” Sontag’s examines how photography mediates the relationship between life and death, and has only swelled with significance and cultural relevance in the decades since, as we have shuttered and pixelated our way into this life-as-commemoration-of-itself age of ours. She writes: "Photographs turn the present into past, make contingency into destiny. Whatever their degree of “realism,” all photographs embody a “romantic” relation to
To begin with, photography appeared to me as something entertaining a simple step in which one took a camera and simply shot a photograph of oneself or a friend. When I was handed my schedule for Mrs. Jones’s class, I felt as if this class had in store a special reward for me. As the days went by, Instead of being anxious of getting out of class I had a craving for additional time in the class. The class kept my eyes glued to the screen ...
In Sontag’s On Photography, she claims photography limits our understanding of the world. Though Sontag acknowledges “photographs fill in blanks in our mental pictures”, she believes “the camera’s rendering of reality must always hide more than it discloses.” She argues photographs offer merely “a semblance of knowledge” on the real world.
Photography has created an outlet for the masses to story tell. It has a way of speaking without words like most art forms and is a manner of expression in itself. To eradicate photography from humans would be equivalent to taking away a limb from humankind. Our society has grown an immense amount of dependency on it. Photography has become almost a daily menial task such as brushing your teeth; where we must take pictures of the things we deem important or equally unimportant, even more so with the invention of social media outlets such as Instagram and Snapchat, where photography is the main source of communication between people who use them. Susan Sontag offers the basis of what taking pictures can undertake in both our daily lives and moments that are not part of our daily lives, such as travel. Traveling to places where one is not accustomed can flare pent up anxiety. A way to subdue that anxiety could be through taking pictures, since it’s the only factor that we have total control over in a space where we don’t have much, or, any control of our surrounding environment. On the other hand, taking photos can also be a tool of power in the same sense as it allows for it to be a defense against anxiety. With the camera in our hands, we have the power to decide who, what, where, when, and why we take a picture. This in turn also gives the person who took the picture power over those who later analyze the photos, letting them decide the meaning of the photo individually, despite the intended or true meaning.