“Be creative, own it, and most importantly, have fun!” Those inspiring words of wisdom were given by my 12th grade English teacher before sending my class off to work on our senior project. Our project was to create a scrapbook based on our growth/change throughout our four years of high school. My freshman year was filled with excitement when new friends were made and anxiety seemed to take over when it came to a new school. Sophomore year I knew who my friends were and I somewhat had an idea about who I thought I was. During my junior year, I had the pleasure of knowing how it felt to love someone but also the horrible feeling of what heartbreak felt like. My senior year was by far my favorite year. I have never laughed, loved, or danced so much in my entire life. But I would have never realized how much I had change through those four years if I wasn’t assigned this project. Just like how Sontag says, photography “means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power”, is how exactly I feel when I look back through my scrapbook filled with “stereotypical” prom pictures, crazy weekend adventure shots, and awkward first day of freshman year photos.
I agree with Sontag’s analogy between society’s view of photography and the prisoners’ perception of the shadows In Plato’s Cave. In today’s society our “photographing eye” is altered to see what we feel is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe, identical to the prisoners, which view shadows of statues that are projected onto the wall of a cave. When the prisoners see the actual object which the shadow is a product of, they feel enlightened, kind of like how we feel when “photographs alter and enlarge our notions” of reality.
Reality is what it is, nothing more and nothing less. We are living beings who visually perceive unthinkingly and in doing so we make our visual reality. And photographs are a huge part of that visual. We are lost in our own thoughts and our own ideas of the world, and we so rarely see reality. The camera sees something, and then records it by taking a photo. And through the photograph, one single image, you get a taste of what happened/what is happening/what will happen.
Sontag’s theory that “photography is an elegiac art” couldn’t be more precise. I believe that the people, who say photography isn’t art, are closed minded. I always have seen photography as another way to express myself. Just like dancers who dance to music that fits their mood/emotion, everyone has their special way to express themselves, regardless if a person is a dancer, a musician, or an artist.
However some people don’t just use photography as self-expression. Some use it as a way to “prove” something that “we hear about, but doubt”, to others it’s a way to keep a record of where they have been or who they have met, and in other words a life story and everyone’s is different.
Photography is also used in media form such as TV, newspapers, or something as simple as a family slide show about their trip to Italy. Photos “fill in blanks in our” memories that we so how seem to forget. It could be anything from the smallest thing, like what you wore, to the biggest thing, like where you went.
As the months and the years pass by, I continue to add on my college years to my high school scrapbook; merging the old friends with the new friends, combining old inside jokes with the new inside jokes and most importantly, collaborating the old memories with the new memories. The more I look through my scrapbook, I recognize more and more where I have been and where I have come from, and those are two things I could never forget.
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