Group Blog 1: Sontag

The image itself is very familiar – a family posing in front of a beautiful landscape. Everyone probably has these pictures of their family and friends. When they go on vacation, people like to take pictures of everyone together, especially when they see something beautiful or new. It is a way of coping with the experience.

By posing in front of the landscape, they are exerting control over it. If they had not posed, but interacted with their surroundings, the picture would show people in the landscape, as part of the landscape. Their poses put them with or in front of the landscape, giving them more importance. They are saying “Look at us and where we are.” They are not saying “Look at this beautiful place I saw.” The picture is not just meant to show others images of where they went, but it is evidence that they were there.

The photographs people take become their memories. As time passes, people forget and the photographs play a larger role in remembering experiences. Ten years after the picture was taken, the family may not remember what they did earlier that day or the day after, when they didn’t take pictures. When they look at this picture, they may remember that moment and that place. When you want to remember something, you take a picture because without that more permanent visual, you fear that you will forget. Cameras give us the ability to control our memories.

Pictures become souvenirs of experience, especially of places we visit. When families get home from their vacation, they talk about their experiences and use the pictures as evidence. The pictures taken become their knowledge of what they saw and they pass this knowledge on. This knowledge becomes their power over the photograph and those they tell about the vacation. They control what they remember; thereby controlling the knowledge they give to other people.

This photograph would be a typical family photo if it weren’t for the negative frame, the underexposure at the edge and the numbers on the side. This photograph is an object. The photographer has left the frame and the numbers to enhance its object qualities. It looks like one of the pictures taken at the very end of a role of film.

To find five images, I looked on facebook because today, that is where people put their vacation and family photographs. The pictures I chose do not look as much like objects, because most of them never were physical objects; however, they still have qualities such as the numbers and the underexposure, which remind us that they were created.