Reading Response #5: (Ritchin Ch.6)

I found this reading to be eye opening in the sense that I hadn't realized how imperative it is to pay attention to how we are using sound and text in our photographs. This reading really made it obvious to me how the meaning of the photograph changes so drastically with how it's presented in terms of form, sound, and text. By putting text on a photograph, in accordance to Ritchin, you are telling the author what to think or what to feel. By adding sound, you are creating a soundscape to a visual representation of the real. By displaying your photographs in a certain form, you are shifting the way the viewer reads them, and are creating a narrative. The order in which you display photographs is incredibly important in context to having your viewer understand what's going on, to understand your narrative.

I also found the idea of the smart photograph towards the end of the reading to be interesting, and how microsoft is making this to make it so photographs have a DNA to them. I find it to be making photographs one step closer to being that depiction of the real, which I find very compelling. In photography, at its core, the point is to be depicting what you are seeing in its rawest, most real, sense. In attaching this DNA type profile to the work, we would be getting closer to making photographs be absolutely real, and I find that absolutely amazing. The photographs would then share something super authentic with the viewer, and that would be DNA, it would make the connection between the viewer and the work to be more personal, they would both have an identity, per say.

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ICE #6

DRY MOUNT:



WET MOUNT:

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Reading Response #4: (Ritchin Ch.4)

I found the part about photographs to be referenced as "mirrors" and "windows" to be very interesting in the sense that I struggle between the two as a photographer. I feel, as a photographer, that my input matters to the photograph and that in some ways, the photographs should be about me as a photographer, as a mirror. In other ways, I feel my photographs should focus on the subject matter, or the "window". As artists in the frame, we have to think so often about both of these reflective surfaces and find a way to balance the two out in a way that works towards our concepts, and challenges the viewer's perspective at the same time. I feel this outlines a prime difference between tourists & artists in terms of photography, or the documentary vs. the art photograph. They both mean different things, but are they both still considered art?

I also found the notion of the mosaic to be very compelling as well, because it shows this interplay of the photograph as a technology, and being inserted into this alternate reality that goes where the artist decides its going to go. Through putting our photographs in this mosaic format & altering their appearance through the use of the rectangle, is it still going to be considered traditional? In having the mosaic become part of this dynamic media, as Ritchin describes, we are transfixing the meaning without even realizing it. It's comparable to how print photographs speak different languages than digitally shown photographs do. In putting a series of photographs in a mosaic and forcing them to be together-we are changing the meaning, we are making it become something else. This also relates to Ritchin's notion of how photographs are half truths, and putting photographs in mosaic form does indeed keep relating to the fact that mosaics can be considered half truths. Through combining more than one photograph in a rectangle, we are creating an alternate truth for the viewer to absorb- a half truth that may not exist otherwise.

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Reading Response #3: (Ritchin Ch.5)

This reading really enlightened me to the fact that politics really are a spectacle for journalistic photographers. Some of the most famous photographs have been political photographs, and they're ones that stick in people's minds, forever. Photographs of war are so publicized, and when people are looking for news, they're usually obsessed with the photographs of the news. Photographs are one of the only ones to document events in their visual formats and because our society is very attracted to tragedy, photographs become popular. When September 11th happened, photographs and videos were some of the first things to become publicized and I remember even sitting in my house and looking at my mom with the newspaper photographs on the kitchen table and watching the video of the towers falling over and over again. Political and war photographs are popular because of our culture and how the people in it are so attracted to paying attention to tragedy. In the Ritchin reading, he was talking about how they were on a deadline and used a photograph of white jazz players and that it didn't really matter what photograph they used because it wasn't big news. This is an example of how the little stories that are just happy and documentary aren't always the most popular to be photographed, or the ones that stick in people's minds, solely because of society wanting to see tragedy. We are so much more likely to pay attention to something when it's tragic, and photographs are the first things to often document tragedy, and Ritchin highlights this. The power of the photograph is translated to the public in tragic events, and many other great photographs of less tragic events are often misused, as Ritchin highlighted. The notion of photographs being misused is something that happens often in journalistic photography; the meaning of photographs are twisted in journalism. I found the bit about camouflaging the artificiality in context to him taking a photograph of politicians with a bunch of other photographers in the frame to be very interesting. The editor wants to manipulate a scene to change its meaning, and it's makes me think that the public shouldn't trust everything they see in journalistic photography; journalists are twisting the power of the photograph to portray some other meaning to better support their own arguments, which is unfortunate because photographs should speak truths, and show truths, to viewers. Journalistic photography is a virtual reality where the journalists are telling us how to think, how to view, essentially.

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