October 2010
34 posts
My aunt clarified recently that the man holding the baby in the photograph below is my Uncle Walter, my grandmother’s brother. He’s holding my Uncle Michael.
I remember visiting my Uncle Walter once, at his house.
First, you see something. Maybe a beach, maybe a tree, maybe a person. You get the urge to photograph it. You want to keep the feeling of the moment. You press the shutter and feel pleased; you anticipate the photograph. You develop the photograph some time after the moment has passed and look at it. Somehow it never matches your feeling. You want to fill in the rest of the world outside the...
Another important Sontag point: “As that claustrophobic unit, the nuclear family, was being carved out of a much larger family aggregate, photography came along to memorialize, to restate symbolically, the imperiled continuity and vanishing extendedness of family life. Those ghostly traces, photographs, supply the token presence of the dispersed relatives. A family’s photograph album...
Susan Sontag writes, in On Photography: “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power […] But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images which now provide most of the...
