REALITY REMOVED

 

DISCLAIMER: Nothing you are about to see is real

OBJECTIVITY

“Although there is a sense in which the camera does in deed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are” (Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave” 6-7)  

“It is a paradox of photography that although we know that images can be ambiguous and are easily manipulated or altered, particularly with the help of computer graphics, much of the power of photography still lies in the shared belief that photographs are object or truthful records of events” (Sturken & Cartwright 17)

 

PROOF

“The picture may distort; but there is always a

presumption that something exists, or did

exist, which is like what’s in the picture” (Sontag,

“In Plato’s Cave” 5)

“Positivism involves the belief that empirical truths can be established through visual

evidence” (Sturken & Cartwright 16)

“Today, everything exists to end in a photograph”

(Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave” 4)

“Those ghostly traces, photographs, supply the

token presence of the dispersed relatives”

(Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave” 9)  

ALWAYS SUBJECTIVE

“Even when photographers

are most concerned with

mirroring reality, they are still haunted by

tacit imperatives of

taste and conscience” (Sontag, “In

Plato’s Cave” 6)

 

“The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects

until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film – the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own

notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry” (Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave” 6)

 

“Photographers are always imposing

standards on their subjects” (Sontag, “In

Plato’s Cave” 6)

 

“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people

into objects that can be symbolically possessed”

(Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave” 14)

 

“No matter what role an image plays, the creation of an image through a camera lens always involves some

degree of subjective choice through selection, framing, and

personalization” (Sturken & Cartwright 16)

 

“Even in surveillance video, someone has programmed the camera to record a particular

part of a space and framed that space in a particular way” (Sturken & Cartwright 16)

 

“In the case of many automatic video and still-photography cameras designed

for the consumer market, aesthetic choices like focus and framing are made as if by the camera itself, yet in fact the designers of these cameras also made

decisions based on social and aesthetic norms such as clarity and legibility”

(Sturken & Cartwright 16)  

“Postmodernism, then, is the critique of grand narratives, the awareness that

such narratives serve to mask the contradictions and instabilities that are

inherent in any social organization or practice” (Klages 169)

 

MICRONARRATIVES

“The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only

carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very

beginning: to democratize all experience by translating them

into images” (Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave” 7)

 

“The camera’s rendering of reality must always hide more than it discloses” (Sontag, “In

Plato’s Cave” 23)  

 

“Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of

understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks” (Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave” 23)

 

BETTER THAN REALITY

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism which everyone

is now addicted” (Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave” 24)  

“Indeed, it is one of the functions of photography to improve the normal appearance of things. Beautifying is one classic operation of the camera, and it tends to bleach out a oral response to what is shown” (Sontag, “Regarding the Pain of Others”)  

“The most famous paintings of Western art history have been photographically and electronically reproduced, and may of these reproductions have been touched up or

altered by means of computer graphics” (Sturken & Cartwright 11-12)

 

IS REALITY

“Simulacra don’t mirror or produce or imitate or copy

reality: they are reality itself, says Baudrillard” (Klages 170)  

“The problem is not that people remember

through photographs, but that they remember only

the photographs” (Sontag, “Regarding the

Pain of Others”)

 

“Simulation is no longer that of a

territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or

reality: a hyperreal”

(Baudrillard)  

“A culture totally dominated by images” (Mitchell 15)

 

“It is the map that precedes the territory” (Baudrillard)

 

CREATES CONVENTION

“Meanings can, and do, vary widely, but only those meanings which a community or culture agrees upon will appear to name reality” (Klages 35)  

“Language and systems of representation do not reflect an already

existing reality so much as they organize, construct, and mediate our

understanding of reality, emotion, and imagination” (Sturken & Cartwright 13)  

“The simulacra forever being projected at viewers

by the mass media provide what Baudrillard calls ‘codes’ or ‘models’ which tell us what and

how to think, act, believe, buy, desire, hate, etc.”

(Klages 171)

 

“One could argue that the contemporary concepts of beauty and thinness naturalize certain cultural norms

of appearance as being universal. These norms constitute a myth in Barthes’s terms, because they are historically and culturally specific, not ‘natural’”

(Sturken & Cartwright 20)  

“To explore the meaning of

images is to recognize that

they are produced

within dynamics of social power and ideology … Images are an important

means through which ideologies are produced and

onto which ideologies are

projected. When people

think of ideologies, they often

think in terms of propaganda

– the crude process of using false

representations to lure

people into holding beliefs

that may compromise

their own interests” (Sturken &

Cartwright 21)  

“The darkening of Simpson’s skin tone cannot be seen as a purely aesthetic choice but rather an

ideological one” (Sturken & Cartwright 24)

 

“We live in a culture in which the association of dark tones with evil and the stereotype of black

men as criminals still circulate” (Sturken & Cartwright 24)

 

MASS CONSUMPTION

“His Marilyn Diptych (1962) on the next page comments not only upon the star’s iconic status

as a glamour figure, but also on the role of the star as media commodity – as a product of the

entertainment industry that could be infinitely reproduced for mass consumption. Warhol’s work emphasizes one of the most important aspects of contemporary images: the capacity to reproduce them in many different context, thereby changing their meaning and altering their value – and that of

the objects or people they represent – as commodities” (Sturken & Cartwright 39)

 

“In the postmodern world of mass media, however, the

original largely disappears, and only copies exist” (Klages 170)

“Today, everything exists to end in a photograph” (Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave” 24)