If you are interested to read the whole essay “Uses Of Photography”, you can do that on the homepage of the University of Northern Iowa (UNI).įor further reading on the nature of photography and ways of seeing you might want to check out the following article on this site: “Shooting Through A Pinhole”, “Train Your Gaze With Henri Cartier-Bresson” and “A Good Excuse To See The World”. In other words it is necessary to develop the ability to “look at images intelligently”. But what’s important is to know about this mechanism when looking and interpreting an image. A photograph will always be subject to the associations of each observer and his ways of seeing – therefore there’ll always be many different versions as to its interpretation. Images taken out of context often confuse rather than they help to shed light on an issue. When replacing the memory that puts things in perspective and gives them a value subject to critical judgment, images make us believe that we live in a world where everything is a spectacle. “Ways of Seeing” or how we perceive and process visual images He argues that an industrialized society needs images to keep running and sustain itself.
To sustain an economic system, for example, as John Berger says in his short essay.
It’s precisely this mechanism that makes photography a powerful instrument of manipulation. Whether it matches or not what the photographer had in mind when he took the image. It’s these factors that ultimately give meaning to an image. Thus the interpretation of each image is subject to the personal experiences, beliefs and opinions of each observer. But soon after that the connection no longer exists. For a brief moment, a split of a second, there is harmony between the physical subject and the image, or if you want the material on which its representation is formed (film, paper, sensor). They are nothing more than a record of an event that has occurred at a certain time in a certain place.īy the light that has left its footprint on the photosensitive material, we know something’s “been there” in front of the camera when the shutter button was presses. In contrast to memory, according to the author, photographic images do not retain significance in themselves. The most striking aspect of text “The Uses Of Photography” for me is when John Berger talks about photographs replacing memory. In his essay “Uses Of Photography”, John Berger – author of Ways Of Seeing – replies to Susan Sontag. It’s an excellent analysis of the far-reaching changes photographic images have made in our way of looking at the world and at ourselves. Almost every photography student has probably read it. Susan Sontag’s book “On Photography” is a classic. John Berger responding to Susan Sontag’s book “On Photography”
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