In the previous essay on reading photos, I looked at how things we know, mental baggage we have accumulated besides just memories, affect what we see in a photograph. Things like cultural background, political beliefs, movies we’ve seen, or books we’ve read.
We’re working our way outwards from our inner selves. Let us turn our […]. petapixel.com
This is the end of my essay series on how we see and think about photographs. While I could certainly ramble on more or less forever, this is a good place to stop. I started from a simple thesis, a single idea: that we react to a photograph differently than we do to, say, a […] petapixel.com »
2021-02-11 19:48
In the ongoing spirit of applying my new(?) model of thinking about photographs to old questions, let’s take a pass through “ethics” to see if anything interesting shows up. I am no philosopher, nor an ethicist, so I use “ethics” here broadly, and colloquially. petapixel.com »
2021-01-27 19:10
If you’ve been following along for any length of time, you might be starting to wonder if the author here even owns a camera, and if so, whether he can work it at all. I can! I really do, and I can! I mean, kinda, anyways. This is a picture I took. Let’s talk about […] petapixel.com »
2021-01-13 19:27
The previous essays in this series have tried to develop some ideas about what happens when people look at photos. The realism, that mass of realistic detail, causes (I claim) a visceral reaction: we feel, we react, we think, a little as if we were transported by the photograph into the scene itself. We find […] petapixel.com »
2021-01-09 19:29
In the previous essay, I introduced a couple of imaginary photographs. The first, an old woman celebrating her birthday with family and friends; the second a photograph of a man seated in a chair, attentive to something out of frame. petapixel.com »
2020-12-22 19:01
This is the third essay in this series, and it begins a smaller sequence of notes running over the ways we as viewers make sense of pictures. We spend, I think, too much time thinking about what happens before and during the making of a picture, but not enough on what happens when someone actually […] petapixel.com »
2020-12-15 21:13
In the previous essay, I made an argument that photographs (and things that are like photographs) metaphorically transport us into the scene of the photo. We react, body and mind, a little bit as if we were actually present. petapixel.com »
2020-12-07 21:32