Reflection on Photography Essay

The photographs that I took for this project were simply to document. I took photos during our process, construction of the letters and then on site to show the progress that our group had made, display how we got from the beginning to end.

But in the Steve Edwards reading, I thought it was really interesting when the author discussed how an artist who could copy down the details of world around them perfectly with a pencil, today highly valued, was once considered a “rude mechanic” and “mindless”. The academics saw it as a mere physical labor type job, and valued positions where one had to think and create originally, so art moved along with that thinking and became more abstract and idealized. I also learned photography’s role in colonializing, how it helped the Europeans separate themselves from their colonial counterparts. The reading overlapped with our photojournalism unit in my Journalism 101 class, as we also discussed the role of a social activist in photography and the photo “The Valley of the Shadow of Death” by Roger Fenton. I thought the distinction between documentary photography and artistic photography was interesting, because for my entire life people have been postulating that all photography is art. I’m not sure if it is really so black and white on either side. I think photographs taken simply for documenting can be incredibly beautiful, and that photos taken for beauty can equally come off as bland as a document. As long as they are not staged, as the reading discusses. I think they can interchange. And in way, all photography documents this time and place, the subject of the photo will always show people in the future what that time looked like.

            I thought this reading was relevant and important for us to look at because of all of the detail it gives about photography and its evolution in the world. Today, we have cameras on every device. It seems that everyone is a photographer and with apps like Instagram, people don’t even need to know how to edit photos with Photoshop. Photography seems quite easy to us, but we don’t often think about the meaning of what we are doing. From the reading we learn that there is a lot of power in images, especially ones for documenting. Now, as design students, we can be conscious of our decisions when taking photographs for art or documenting. 

From the “Photo Ops” reading, I got a refresher on what they taught me in high school photography class. It was nice to see some great examples of symmetry, asymmetry, repetition, framing, and movement. And the other pages about continuous mode, exploration and close-ups give ideas for inspiration for the next time I take photos. I thought this reading was good because it reminded me of the basics of photography and gave me a few ideas on what to try out the next time I’m taking photos.