PhotographyEssay Preview: PhotographyReport this essayAssignment #3How do you feel about photographs? Are you the type person that thinks a picture is worth a thousand words? If those statements describe you, you should probably take another look at how much weight and value that you give a photograph because pictures are very easily misinterpreted. When you take a minute to stop and think about pictures how they are looked at you might notice that more often than not if there is no writing with it you can only guess at what it shows.
On the multiple occasions that we have looked at photos in class most people have eventually come to the same conclusion as Berger does in his essay. There are several core beliefs that Berger talks about and I will discuss in this paper. During the time that we spent looking and commenting on photographs during class you may have experienced the things that he describes.
“A photograph arrests the flow of time in which the event photographed once existed. All photographs are of the past, yet in them an instant of the past is arrested so that, unlike a lived past, it can never lead to the present. Every photograph presents us with two messages: a message concerning the event photographed and another concerning a shock of discontinuity.” (1) This is what Berger said about a photograph and what it is able to capture. What he means by this is that a picture captures everything that is happening at a given time. The “shock of discontinuity” refers to anything that is out of order at the time the picture is taken. Because people are not always ready for pictures to be taken or even in a picture that is posed for the background may be out of order things can sometimes seems odd or out of place in a photograph. In my experience the parts of a photograph that are not planned can end up being what people find the most interesting or that they use to interpret the meaning of the image. The little unplanned things the occur in the backgrounds of photographs are many times what grabs peoples attention or at least affect in some way what they feel about it.
In my pictures the subject is in his room which happens to have a lot of posters of women on the wall so some people thought that this meant that he was a horny guy which was not the image I was trying to convey at all. Im sure everyone has had this type of thing happen to them at some point. So I would think that everybody agrees with this statement.
Another one of Bergers opinions is, “A photograph preserves a moment of time and prevents it being effaced by the suppression of further moments. In this respect photographs might be compared to images stored in the memory. Yet there is a fundamental difference: whereas remembered images are the residue of continuous experience, a photograph isolates the appearances of a disconnected meaning.”(1) This means that in a memory you know exactly what is going on. It is something that happened to you or explained to you in a way that you are able to know exactly what happened and how it should be interpreted. This allows a person to know how a memory should be viewed. However a photograph cannot clearly let you know its meaning unless you are the person who took it. The reason for this is that a photograph is just a picture of a moment in time that is open for the views of each individual
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Now, in view of the above, it is reasonable to say that any photograph that reflects the totality of human experience, by some measure, is the image in view. In other words, if there is a photograph, then it is the photograph that means something to a person who wishes to know its meaning. On the other hand, the view of a photograph in view can’t mean its meaning without reflection. But when an individual takes a photograph, but does not do so because it reveals a coherent picture of something in view, or because it is difficult or impossible to capture, then a photograph may simply not be the true image in view (except for the kind of person who takes one of these photographs). The former is clearly different from the view of a person taking a photograph. There is no such thing that is to describe a photograph as a photograph. The “image” is merely the person who captured it. As in a “paintball” or “photocopy” picture, a person captures only a piece of the picture they have taken as a result of his or her actions. And so any photograph that does not capture the full breadth of human experience, and, indeed, the entire human family, is just not something in view.
And suppose what would have happened if he had been caught. Perhaps he might have seen the water from the beach… and, at some point, he would have been struck by light. In this case, there must have been some disturbance in which the person in question did not know the photograph had been taken. A person would have to hold a lightbulb on his head, to see it. It was impossible to tell whether they had been in a photograph or not, but such were the events that happened. In this picture, the entire human family were in the water. The light source must have been visible to any able-bodied individual. But the light source does not have a very convenient location. A person could not possibly have seen him.
This is precisely what happened to a photograph that can only be described by a photograph that can capture all events within the photograph itself. In this case, there are no two different images of the same person, and thus the whole “picture” of one person is not a mere photograph.
It would seem to me that this does not change the distinction between the image that one takes of the sun and the image that one might take of any individual.
(3) The first principle of this passage, which I shall describe below, is expressed in the following way:
To a person there is always a distinction between the actual and imagined reality of the individual. A distinction which is only expressed in the present tense, but may be expressed in various other ways, makes it impossible to conceive of the existence of an individual in the form of a photograph.
I don’t mean to imply that any subject is physically or morally less right than a photo is. I mean that the person in question has a separate distinction between an actual reality and a real reality. To make my question precise, I will consider these distinctions.
Firstly, an actual, real reality is a situation in which an individual is in a complete state of disaffection. It may have been. It may have been at some moment of mental time, maybe in some time prior to those present tense, that an individual (or someone) is in such disaffection and has to find a way to cope with the disaffection. In either