art 341 journal assignment 1 Susan Sontag

1. Photographs function in our culture in many different ways. Some of these include for personal use, media, advertising, art, education, remembering, evidence, information. These uses just scrapes the surface of the amount of things that photo's are used for.
2. Some of the inherent qualities that most people associate with a photograph include generally revolve around truth. People believe that a photograph is absolute truth that something has occurred and even though photo's can be edited people still see it as truth.
3. "That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption -- the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed -- seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art." (Susan Sontag) I find this interesting because the use of photography is continually evolving. As new technology comes Photography is used for different. reasons. First it was just for art, then for recording information, and now it is often used in advertising.