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In this Episode
In part 2 of our podcast on Susan Sontag On Photography we take a look at some of the other key themes in the text. While each essay focuses on a central theme, many of her core concepts and principles are dominate across the entire text. In this podcast, I focus on a few of the key concepts that I think most photographers could pull out of the text and find useful in understanding their work. In particular we focus on the following concepts:
- Everything in the world can be the subject of a photograph, but just because you point a camera at it doesn’t make it interesting.
- Photographs are fragments at best. They represent framing fragments, time fragments and contextual fragments. In many ways they become like quotes in a book. In the context and understanding of the text, they make sense, but when remove from their context and source they can often times take on a new meaning.
- Photography is based in surrealism and defends this position with three key tenants:
- Photographs are duplicates of the world.
- Although duplicates of the world, they are easily enhanced (manipulated) by the photographer to change meaning.
- Intention is not present in the work and that the relationship between the photographer and object is more co-operative in nature and mediated in dialog by a machine.
- Photography is lacking in a cohesive structure and language to understand photographs. This, I believe, is because photography has so many sub-groups that it is difficult to use a single cohesive model to understand all photography. Rather, we should start to look at photography as defined and understood by it’s sub-groups.
Photoshop World 2016
I an also so excited to be an instructor at Photoshop World 2016 this summer in Las Vegas. I am teaching four classes and I would love to see you down there this July. You can find more information over at www.photoshopworld.com.
If you subscribe to the Perceptive Photographer up on in iTunes, I would love to hear some feedback or have you take a few minutes for you to do a quick review up on iTunes it can help others learn about the show.