My mom is an avid photographer. She shoots with a Nikon D-90, which is the same camera many professional photographers use. It feels like every second of my life is documented in photographs, and her favorites are put into the 30+ lovingly made and carefully designed scrapbooks that fill a hutch in our living room. Also in the hutch are several antique cameras which my mom inherited from her grandfather, also a photographer. My mom is always looking at photographs, explaining to me how it should be clearer or how to crop the photo to get the right effect or what the best lighting for a given situation is. She has won several awards for her nature photography, and our family jokes that Ritz Camera is her equivalent to the bar in the t.v. show "Cheers". Everyone there knows her name, and one woman even has her phone number memorized. My entire life I have grown up immersed in photography. So, when reading this chapter on analyzing photography, a lot of it was about things that come second-nature to me.
What struck me the most when reading this chapter was the idea that photography forces us to look at a scene from the perspective of the photographer. This made me think about all the things that go un-photographed in our lives. There are millions of photographs of beautiful ballerinas, yet few that document the anorexia that is more common among dancers than even models. Photos of cities like New York, London, and Paris are the subject of the posters on my apartment walls, but the picture they paint shows nothing of the homeless, the drug addicts, or the prostitutes that lurk just around the corner. Getting a little more personal, my facebook page has 76 albums full of pictures, supposedly documenting my life since I joined facebook my sophomore year of high school. These pictures show most of the best times I have had. They help me to remember the things and people I valued most at any given point in time. However, they leave out millions of moments that went undocumented, either because I did not have a camera or did not wish to remember these moments. I have no pictures of me when my high school boyfriend (who happened to also be my best friend) broke up with me, and I experienced true heartbreak for the first time. No camera accurately photographed the feeling of combined triumph and sadness I experienced when I danced for the last time with the studio I had grown up with. I have no pictures of the moments when I cried in my dorm room my freshman year, wondering why in the world I had chosen UT. I have no pictures of the countless nights I have spent in the library. Conversely, in high school, I worked harder than I had ever worked in my life to get the position of drum major in the band, but there was no camera to capture the moment when I found out I had gotten the spot. I have no pictures of my best friend dragging me out of the library to go to the movies with him countless times, forcing me to forget school for at least a little while. When I finished my first 8K road race, my mom snapped a picture of me crossing the finish line, but there is no picture that can show the extreme sense of accomplishment I felt running the last 50 feet of the race I had trained so hard for, or how finishing the race felt from my viewpoint. There are no pictures that show how a student-led bible study I attended in high school called Project 217, completely changed my life forever.
Photographs are extremely interesting to me. They usually show only the best of ourselves, helping us to feed our egos and remember the great times we've had while forgetting the bad. The quote "the older I am, the better I was" rings so true in relation to photography. Of course, there is photography of the devastation caused by wars, the starving children of Africa, the victims of Hitler's infamous concentration camps, and countless other horrifying moments in the world's history, but these still force us to look at events from the photographer's perspective. Regardless of the picture, photos always give us a somewhat distorted sense of reality. This can be a powerful way to make a point, a way to save a precious memory, or it can present us with a false truth. Obviously, photography is very near to my heart. I am a very visually-oriented person so photos are to me what poetry or paintings are to others. It is important, though, to remember when both viewing and taking photos that the photographer has complete control over what we see.
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