-Photographs furnish evidence. In other words, there is a natural tendency to believe that a photograph has captured reality, when it may be the exact opposite.
-Memorializing achievements and moments in life. Photographs, like the polaroid, are used as an "instant" capture of some great moment in life so as to never forget it.
-Photographs are used to document things. Whether it means documenting people--like a portrait, or documenting evidence--at a crime scene, perhaps.
-Photographs are used to evoke emotions, whether they be sexual or mournful. Magazines of images for men to masturbate to, contrasted by images of a war which are meant to record a tragic event in hopes to remind us not to delve there again.
-Photographs are used as messages, much like art. They have become a way of experiencing something. We "see" the Amazon, but never "go" there.
2. Describe the inherent qualities of a photograph.
Photographs will always have some sort of sentimentalism. They can be humanist or cynical, but they will always have sentiment. Photographs contain a slice of time, a memory that will never move, never change. A photograph has a sense of unattainability as well as a sense of reality. All photographs contain someone's or something's mortality, they capture it for all of time. Photographs alter the scale of the world, and in doing so, package the world. These are the inherent qualities of photographs, as Susan Sontag lists them.
3. Choose a quote from Sontag's article that you find interesting, and explain why it is relevant to you.
The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: 'There is the surface. Now think--or rather feel, intuit--what is beyond it, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.' Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.
This particular quote stuck with me for a few reasons. First, I thought it was a wonderful conclusion of photography. It explains the very mystery of photography that many fail to understand or realize. What the photographer captures in the frame is not necessarily reality, it is a cropped reality, a censored reality, it is the reality the photographer wants you to believe. In some cases, both are the same. However, in majority of the cases, both are vastly different. I felt this quote was relevant to me because my recent assignment was using particular camera angles and techniques to make things look "larger than life." This in itself is one of the many ways that photography is deceiving. For my assignment I chose to photograph playground slides, taking them with an obscure angle that caused the slides to look long and gigantic, much like they felt when we were children. In this way, my photographs obscured reality, but they also served to send a message to the viewer of nostalgia, a time when they were children. Also, they send a message of question. Is the slide really that big? This is when the quote comes into play. What is beyond the reality I have presented? Beyond my reality is everything really large like that? Or have I chosen to crop and arrange the subject matter how I desired?
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