Stuff I never really thought about.

[elderberrywine]

On Photograohy, Susan Sontag. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. Library book.

What a fascinating take on photography, including such concepts such as those of us born mid-20th century are the first to know what we looked like as children due to the proliferation of cheap and easy-to-use cameras.

Sontag takes on photography as a news component, subject vs camera, art vs photography, and the work of several notable photographers. And then there is the question of does an object gain beauty by virtue of being photographed. As Sontag nicely puts it, In photographing dwarfs, you don't get majesty & beauty. You get dwarfs. Oh, SNAP Arbus!

And then there's this comforting thought. To look at an old photograph of oneself, of anyone one has known, or a much photographed public person is to feel, first of all, how much younger I (she, he) was then. Photography is the inventory of mortality. Gulp. Makes you look at your dorky high school picture a little differently, no?

Comments

[xylohypha]

Makes you look at your dorky high school picture a little differently, no?

Yep.

And then (as I chew over what I've just read...) there's the way photography and the viewing of photographs have changed in the digital age. It would seem that with photos so much easier to copy and share (not to mention the ease of taking them--no need to be sure to have film, nor to get it developed!) it will become unremarkable to see old ("young") versions of ourselves. Yet, I look back on hours spent on the couch with family members, poring over old photograph albums and trying to decipher the captions inked in below those old black and white images, I wonder if gathering around a monitor to view digital images will fill the same space for those born more recently.

[elderberrywine]

Oh, how did you read my mind? I was going to mention that the digital camera, and most especially the cell phone camera, have turned photography into an entirely kettle of fish. In the film era, you had a limited number of shots (unless you were a pro), so you thought carefully about each one before taking it. And now I watch girls taking a cell phone picture of themselves to see if they have something in their teeth.

It would have been fascinating to see what Sontag would have made of that.

[shelley6441]

Ignoring any self-photos beyond elementary school, there's something so satisfying about flipping through photos of friends, family, or even complete strangers. While I love the immediacy of my digital camera and being able to erase crappy shots, my favs are still those classics from the 60s and early 70s with the white borders. That is taking it waaaaay back but there it is.