Three writing examples
- Susan Sontag, “The Image World”
The most important thesis in Sontag’s essay is was difficult to define exactly because of my own difficulty in understanding the text. However, I think the most important argument is that photographs can control the way we see moments from the perspective of the photographer behind the camera and not from being there and having the real experience. “What photography supplies is not only a record of the past just a new way at looking at the past” (87). The argument could be that Photographs are a means of control, photos have more impact than writing. “A photograph gives control over the thing photographed” (82). Sontag also points out how we are controlled by images in society “Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers).”(93).
Sontag (1999) compares the camera to binoculars that “makes exotic things near, intimate; and familiar things small, abstract, strange, much farther away.” (87). She describes her personal experience “In the operating room, I am the one who changes focus, who makes the dose-ups and the medium shots. In the theater, Antonioni has already chosen what parts of the operation I can watch; the camera looks for me – and obliges me to look, leaving as my only option not to look.” (89). “Knowing a great deal about what is in the world (art, catastrophe, the beauties of nature) through photographic images, people are frequently disappointed, surprised, unmoved when they see the real thing.” I found this interesting because sometimes I see landmarks that look so different in photographs an my expectations were different based on what I thought I would see because of the angle that the photograph may have been taken on.
Sontag states “To us, the difference between the photographer as an individual eye and the photographer as an objective recorder seems fundamental, the difference often regarded, mistakenly, as separating photography as art from photography as document” (91). My question about this would be if this applies to journalists images, are they documents or art too? How do we know the difference?
2. Why is the concept of representation important?
“Representation is an essential part of the process by which meaning is produced and exchanged between members of a culture. It does involve the use of language, of signs and images which stand for or represent things.” (15) But it is more complicated than this as the reading covers the concept in depth. To my understanding, the meaning of representation is how a thing is described and symbolized when looked at from a cultural perspective. For example, on page 16 the cross is described as two pieces of wood across each other, but in the christian culture it represents the crucifixion of Christ. Representation is all around us, but to what culture are the things around us aimed at having meaning to. I think this is why the concept of representation is important because it can affect the way people see themselves and others in society.
3. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage”
According to Lacan, the ego develops when the child see themselves in the mirror and seperate themselves from the world (502), this is the beginning of the ego. Lacan, is similar to Freud in the way he uses a lot of new words in Psychoanalysis. The point that related to me was about the child looking in the mirror. I found this very interesting. My question would be – When does the ego develop?
To my understanding this could be when subjectivity starts too, when we start to see things based on our individual relationship to the things around us instead of as a whole.
