My final paper about the meaning of photographs

The Meaning of Photographs Today

In the past taking a photo required a lot more work than just pressing a button. Old time cameras were more complicated than today’s digital ones. Since taking pictures has become so easy there have been an abundance of landscapes, celebrations, and memories captured than ever before. I believe that photography today has a different meaning than it did in the past. For example, certain Native American tribes and certain religions had, and some still have, negative views on having their picture taken. There is the belief that if you have your picture taken that it will “steal your soul” (Bobos). Even Sontag comments on how people felt about photographs stating “the less sharp is the distinction between images and real things; in primitive societies the thing and its image were simply two different, that is, physically distinct, manifestations of the same energy or spirit” (155).

In the films Last Year in Marienbad and Hiroshima Mon Amour, the use and meaning of photography is different than what earlier “primitive” societies thought about photography. In Last Year in Marienbad the main character Mr. X is trying to convince the woman that they had met the year before and had a love affair. In the middle of the film he shows her a picture that he says he took of her last year. In this instance the picture’s purpose was to evoke a memory, it was supposed to make her remember that she had met him and that he wasn’t lying. In the beginning of Hiroshima Mon Amour the woman is talking about how she saw the pictures and other artifacts of Hiroshima in a museum and says that she “saw everything”. The man however states, “You saw nothing in Hiroshima, nothing” insisting that just because she saw photographs doesn’t mean she knows what it was like. In this film the photographs in the museum were meant to show and try to evoke an understanding of what it was like in the aftermath of the bombing in Hiroshima. To the woman she felt like she could understand what it was like in Hiroshima after viewing all the things in the museum, especially the pictures. Sontag believes that pictures can elicit some kind of sympathy or empathy stating “the quality of feeling, including moral outrage, that people can muster in response to photographs of the oppressed, the exploited, the starving, and the massacred also depends on the degree of their familiarity with these images” (19). What she means is that it is possible to have certain feelings and understanding of what is going on in a picture if you are familiar with the images, but none the less you can still have feelings about a picture.

“A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a give thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture” (Sontag 5). In Sontag’s notion of photography in her booked titled “On Photography”, she illustrates what photography is and the progression of photography from what people thought about it in the beginning to, for the most part, what it meant to the generation of her time. She states that “photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it” (5). By this she means that people believe things when they can see it. For humans it is hard for us to believe anything if it is not tangible so in a sense seeing something in a picture, which is tangible, evokes a belief in what is being seen. This is what I feel photography is about, being able to see things if you were not physically there to see it in person or also to remember something you once saw. Which ever it maybe, essentially you will believe it because it shows proof. This is only true though if the picture was not manipulated in some way.

Usually when you look at a picture that means something to you it will elicit emotions in you. “Memorializing the achievements of individuals considered as members of families (as well as of other groups) is the earliest popular use of photography” (Sontag 8). This explains that photography started out with wanting to capture special events to be remembered. When one looks back on a picture it evokes an emotion and memory of what was happening in that photo. An example would be photos of a wedding, every time the bride or groom looks back on those photos, their memory of that day comes to mind and all the emotions that were felt on that day will usually also return. Today photographs are not used merely for “memorializing achievements” they are for remembering everything from a baby’s birth to a vacation in the Bahamas. Sontag also explains the evolution of taking pictures for any situation was brought about when cameras were made to be easily used. Pictures became especially prominent in travel, to the traveler photos are “a way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it, by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir” (Sontag 9).

Since the invention of cameras photography has become a new art form but is also a highly used amateur practice. It has become so well known a practice in today’s time probably because the rate of change of the world is happening. There are “an untold number of forms of biological and social life are being destroyed in a brief span of time” (Sontag 16) and now there is a device to capture all that is disappearing. Most people want to capture certain moments, scenes in nature, and landmarks because they know they won’t always be there but if they have a picture of it, they will always have that memory.

I have now discussed the evolution of the meanings of photography starting with early native people thinking that taking a picture would steal someone’s soul, to then photos being used for family rituals and tourism, now in the present photographs are used for social reasons. One main example of social usage of photos is the social networking site Facebook. With more than 500 million people on Facebook and billions of pictures posted each month this is just one of the examples of the use of photos in a social context.

The snapshot camera was introduced in 1883 by Kodak and was a “portable medium that allowed users to record personal experiences” (Lee 266). Now with the “development of digital cameras, and their connection with communication networks, has transformed photo-taking conventions and expanded the range of photography’s social usage” (266) as described by Lee in his article Digital Cameras, Personal Photography and Reconfiguration of Spatial Experiences. His article goes on to explain that photo sharing used to be “home mode” which is the act of compiling pictures into a photo album and building a “mnemonic framework for oral presentation and collective conversation that brings one’s stories into the presentation of the album” (Lee 267). This allowed people to share their moments and experiences with only those close, intimate family and friends. These days it has become more common with the younger generation to post pictures on the Web for almost anyone to see. The digital age has transformed the “nature of photographic performance and its cultural significance” (Lee 267). Since digital cameras are so easy to use and the images are inexpensive to create, it has allowed people to capture every moment of their experience of life (Lee 276).

With social networking sites such as Facebook, Myspace, and blogs photographs are now meant as personal expressions. This is a major difference between earlier meanings of pictures and present day meanings. Research on photos being posted on Facebook and other social sites has began to emerge. Such research contains the relationships between personality and how many photos a person is “tagged” in on Facebook and also on the personality trait of narcissism and photo sharing. A big research topic in psychology on this subject is the fact that most people using Facebook are using it to “hype themselves up”, trying to make themselves look like they are a certain person rather than who they really are. Since a picture can say a thousand words, people use this to their advantage. For example if a person believes that partying makes them “cool” then they would most likely add photos of themselves at parties in hopes that people will think they are “cool” and will like them. Again this is only an example of what could be a possible mental process of a Facebook user. These are just a few examples of how people are trying to understand this new meaning of social usage of photos.

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted” (Sontag 24). Taking pictures has progressed as a form of remembering and personal expression. Today’s generation wants to be more individualized and social networking sites have made this possible by allowing one to make their mini home pages unique and expressive. Photographs have turned into a social usage that I believe will continue in the future as long as there are social networking sites. Photos are still used for capturing achieving moments, celebrations and tourism today but have also evolved into the meaning of personal expression.