By Kelly Latham
While I was reading, a few things in particular stuck out to me; what the snapshot did to photography, what snapshot photography did to history, and how the photographer uses “The Thing Itself”, “The Frame”, “Time”, and “Vantage Point” to manipulate the truth.
When I first took a photo class, I was always told “take photographs, not snapshots; snapshots are of things, photos are about things”. So I just always regard anything called a snapshot as bad. When I was reading this article, I got from it that snapshots were bad because they took away from the art of photography. People ignored “composition, light, shade, and texture” and just took momentary pictures of what they thought was pretty and then moved on. I think that that is why people think that photography is so easy; because they can pull of a snapshot. But they do not know what they should be looking for in a photograph that is meant to be artistic.
However, because there were so many snapshots being taken, everything started being recorded. Before snapshots, only important things were painted, so only what rich people deemed important was remembered. Now, everything was remembered, so everything became important. I think that that could be a good thing and a bad thing. Good in that we know a lot more about what was actually going on in history, even down to the little things. But bad because maybe there were so many snapshots of pointless things that the important photographs were overlooked and mistaken for a snapshot. Maybe the photograph was more important, and now it is lost, along with whatever was image was more important than the snapshot image. But the snapshot lives on, possible causing history to remember something that it far less important than what should be remembered.
Being an amateur photographer with my few classes and lots of personal teaching, I surprised me that the article pointed out how many ways the truth can be manipulated through photography, even thought it is an image from something that actually happened. For example, in “The Thing Itself” paragraphs, it pointed out that the earth was the real artist and the photographer was the one that had to record it correctly. It made me think that photographers are just stealing what the earth is doing and calling it their own. But in recording these happenings, there were hardly recorded the way they were actually seen. The would use unnatural clarity and made things and items seem significant when they may have been extremely insignificant. And while the photographer did all this, it was believed that a photographer could not lie. So, I believed that in doing so, a photograph brings unimportant things to attention while the real important things are left to be forgotten. Kind of like with snapshots versus photographs.
In “The Detail” part of the introduction, it talked about that photographers could not tell the whole story, just fragments of the truth. So once again, the photographer is lying to the viewer. So to try to get the whole story down, the narrative sequence was made, but that still didn’t cover the whole story, just a fake story that was still missing parts. “The narratives were not used to make the story clear, they were used to make it real”. That last sentence confuse me for a while, but then I understood it as giving the viewer enough of the components of the story to make their own conclusions with it, giving them the freedom to make it whatever story they wanted. So, it made it real to the viewer because they would have the chance to make it whatever they wanted, but it was still not clear what the actual and original story was. So once again, photographs just lied.
The next section titled “The Frame” really interested me, because nothing like it had been pointed out to me before. I did know that it was important what was in the frame, out of the frame, and then there were no distractions at the edges of the frame, but it hadn’t occurred to me that it creates relationships that don’t exist and breaks ones that do. Because the frame cannot fit everything in the image. That why its a frame, not the world. It has edges. But, without being able to fit everything in, it is not telling the whole truth, so it is lying.
The final section of the introduction to “The Photographer's Eye” is titled “Vantage Point”. It pointed out that photographers teach us to see from unexpected vantage points. But, is that a real depiction of the world? So is the camera once again lying to us? Or misleading us?
What I mainly got from this article is with photographs, nothing can be truly and wholly conveyed. And then I got to thinking. Can anything truly and wholly convey anything else? I don’t think so… Hmm. This article has greatly troubled my understanding of art and what it represents. Because, anything and everything that attempts to reproduce something realistically is telling lies about it, because it is not one-hundred percent conveying it correctly, or it is leaving out parts, or can be interpreted be everyone differently. And if everything is interpreted by everyone differently, then why to artists try to convey what they see through their art, when no one will ever see it exactly the same way?
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