Quotes and Image Response

 

On Photography – Susan Sontag

 

-         -   “Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art”. 

-  “Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.”

Chapter 7 

-  “Publicity persuades us of such a transformation by showing us people who have apparently been transformed and are, as a result, enviable. The state of being envied is what constitutes glamour. And publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour.” 

-  “Publicity is effective precisely because it feeds upon the real. Clothes, food, cars, cosmetics, baths, sunshine are real things to be enjoyed in themselves. Publicity begins by working on natural appetite for pleasure. But it cannot offer the real object of pleasure in that and there is no convincing substitutes for a pleasure that pleasure’s own terms.”

As we discuss in class images can be a form of evidence, proof that a situation has occurred, but what did people do when they could not see what was going on? At times people would listen to the news or sports games and must come up with their own interpretation and their own visuals based on what they hear. Now everything is recorded and can be played back as many times as a person would like to. In both scenarios a person can take their own interpretation of a game or news and it would be their truth cause it is what they believe to be happening at that time.