What Does Photography Mean to Me?

  "The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph, it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth." If the statement is saying that before a photo is taken, the emotion that is happening before it will not always be replicated with the same emotion before the picture was taken, I would have to say I agree. Any emotion or feeling that is seen before a moment is capture will not look the same to the person that has taken the photograph to someone looking at the photograph. The interpretation of a photo can easily be changed in anyones eyes and tell them something different about what is happening in the photo. Everything someone says about a photograph they are looking at automatically becomes an opinion. A photo reprints pieces of reality, and people are really just commenting on what they see based on the reality they are livi...

  “Because  each photograph is only a fragment, its moral and emotional weight depends on where it is inserted. A photograph changes according to the context in which it is seen: thus ...  photographs will seem different on a contact sheet, in a gallery, in a political demonstration, in a police file, in a photographic magazine, in a book, on a living-room wall. Each  of  these situations suggest a different use for the photographs but none can secure their meaning .”  -  Susan Sontag , On Photography by Susan Sontag , ISBN: 0385267061 , Page: 10 Photography has the power to express so many different types of emotions. So many things can be communicated through images and send different messages to each person that looks at photos. The fact that photographs can be edited like the one above also goes to show the impact on editing a photo can have. A basic picture of president Obama was turned into a beacon of hope. So much can w...

" Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them" pg 2 Photos can last a long time or can be very short lived. I never really thought about how much photographs go through so much within time. The fact the photographs can age faster than humans and easily die out as in disappear or get lost just like humans is crazy. So many things can happen with photos that are printed, but as society has advanced photos are never really lost now or just old and fragile but tucked somewhere in a file. As stated in ...