Susan Sontag on Photography

--Photographs are our window into the world.
--They seem to be less of a statement about the world, and more of a small piece of it.
--There can be a specific need to make the perfect picture.  The retaking of pictures until the exact exposure, expression, and mood.  There is a sense of truth though, there are just raw images of life that could be seen as unbearable.  The camera just captures what we already see. There is no changing it like a painting or drawing.
--Photographs became art because of industrialization.  There was a rebellion to be more then just a documentary purpose.
--Cameras are the very foundation of family life and documentation.  So many people use it for this reason.  The family photos are the poor man's art pieces.  The show every stage of life.
-- it shows experience. And it will always exist making that memory concrete
--The use could be or even seem some thing like an addiction, the need to photograph.
-- It can also seem harming in a way, the taking of a picture, the taking of a moment or even the sense of privacy.
-- In trying to understand life you need to be able to process pictures.  The life we live is made up of them, tv, social media, advertising and art.  There is not a day we go without seeing some type of visual image. Photographs are a foundation to a visual language that is shown to us all day.
--In using this visual communication there is endless possibilities that could be used to get any and every message across.
--Photography is taking the most shocking things like starvation, oppression and war and making it visible to the people who never see it.  The amazing thing about photography is how quickly and easily it can convey a message to so many people to evoke change
--taking photographs is not always accepting what we see, but we accept to record that moment.
--everything in our world, digital or analog, exists to end in a photograph.

The Allegory of the Cave

The Allegory of the Cave.

--Socraties and Glaucon speak of a cave in which prisoners are held.

-- The darkness is all surrounding, the sight of light is something that the prisoners would find painful and also foreign.

-- The objects the prisoners see on the wall would be something familiar to them, if the true objects were to be placed in front of them they would not seem real, because they have never been exposed to it.

--This is something that is almost sad. It is spoken how painful it would haven been for these prisoners to look into the light or even move. 

-- If these men were to be released there would be confusion, wonder and even terror.  They have been kept in the dark for so long to go out in to the world, and the light, would be an overwhelming situation and one that could even send their sensory processes in to a tailspin.

--How would someone transition from life in darkness to life in the sun; would it be a new life that object seem strange because the shadows seem to the their truest form for the prisoners?

--There are two types of bewilderment, going into the light and going into darkness.

-- if not for seeing in the dark, there is no seeing in the light.  The only way to truly understand what you see is to be held at the point of no return.

--The truest rulers must be brought from the darkness.