Week 8 - Photography and Culture

The dawn of photography began in 1827 when Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, the first successful photographer took a shot of his courtyard using an asphalt that solidifies when in contact with sunlight and then placed onto a glass plate. He called his product Heliographs, after the Greek "of the sun" (Leggat, 1999). 

People became obsessed with "prosthetically" embedding memory into pictures because it last longer than our biological memory. According to Wells (1997), photography verifies our experience of 'being there', which is not merely one of visiting an unfamiliar place, but of capturing the authentic experience of a strange place. Photographs are records and documents which pin down the changing world of appearance". When we take a photograph, it immortalize the scene and memory. We capture nostalgic moments and produce them forever in the form of pictures. 

So if we say photography capture moments, then does it show the truth?

  

Picture 1

Picture 2

Picture 1 is a combination of a before and after edit of a woman. Which woman is real? How would viewer distinguish between the two? Because with the brilliance of technology, we can now manipulate pictures.

Is there such an animal as Picture 2? Again, technology is so advanced that photo-manipulation can create 'real pictures'. In this era, more than half of us have never seen a saber tooth tiger, but in fact we know the picture below represents a saber tooth tiger.

Hence, the public should be more skeptical about every image that is presented to them because the power of the photograph lies on the hands of the creator of the photographer. Susan Sontag stated that the photographer is relatively powerful thus may be seen as predator. She also mentioned that photographers are not necessarily sentimental, or candid, they may be used for policing or incrimination.

However to answer the issue of whether photography is a culture analysis, we must look into what is being captured (person, place and circumtance) and who captures it. 

Celia Lury argues in her book 'Prosthetic Culture' (1998) that we live in a world where it is no longer possible to survive without technological prosthetics. Hence photographs are apart of culture because it captures the past and present and with digital photography, it may be even manipulated to create a futuristic representation of the upcoming culture.

"It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world, we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled" (Berger, 1972: 7).

The photograph above indicates the clothing, scene and relationship between the two boys hence showing us a culture

This advert demonstrates our culture in the sense of us living in the "fast lane"

This is a recent photo taken of me and my friends which shows the Bruneian culture in terms of physical features, clothing, facial and body gestures. It shows the Bruneian youth culture

The picture above shows the American society of driving big cars hence shows their culture.

Even the Picture 1 is cultural critique because it shows our digital-age where we manipulate pictures to suit what we describe 'attractive' in our culture. Picture 2 shows our advances in technology and photo-manipulation skills that connotes our Information Age culture.

References:

Batchen. G, (2004). Forget me not: Photography and rememberance (pp. 6-16). New York: Princeton architectural press.

Wells, L. (1997). Thinking about photography. Photography: a critical introduction (pp. 24-54) London: Routledge.