Response to "The Practices of Looking"

“Looking involves learning to interpret and, like other practices, looking involves relationships of power. To willfully look or not is to exercise choice and influence. To be made to look, to try to get someone else to look at you at something you want to be noticed, or to engage in an exchange of looks, entails a play of power.” Pg. 10
• I never thought of “looking” in this way. I don’t know if I believe it. Is telling someone to look at something really power or powerful?

“Yet it remains the photographer who frames and takes the image, not the camera itself. At the same time, despite the subjective aspects of the act of taking a picture, the aura of machine objectively clings to mechanical and electronic images. All camera-generated images, be they photographic, cinematic, or electronic (video or computer-generated), bear the cultural legacy of still photography, which historically has been regarded as a more objective practice than, say, painting or drawing. This combination of the subjective and the objective is a central tension in camera-generated images.” Pg. 16
• I don’t totally understand what this means….

“A photograph is often perceived to be an unmediated copy of the real world…” pg. 17
• What do you think of the myth of photographic truth?

“Digital imaging thus can be said to have partially eroded the public’s trust in the truth-value of photography and the camera image as evidence.” Pg. 20
• So what next? Will it get to a point to where we can’t trust any pictures?

“Whereas Newsweek used the mug shot as it was, Time heightened the contrast and darkened Simpson’s skin tone in its use of this image on the magazine’s cover, reputedly for “aesthetic” reasons. Interestingly, the magazine’s publishers do not allow this cover to be reproduced.” Pg. 24
• Sort of amazed by this, but not at the same time…

“Glamour is the quality of being envied.” Pg. 39
• Never thought about it in this way…