The Power of Images
Long and great essay of photography in the hybrid medium, From Daguerreotype to Photoshop. Robin Kelsey dissects the “hybrid medium” of photography, published in Hardvard Magazine.
“It illustrates how people posing for portraits in the nineteenth century tried to convey their status, character, and modernity in pictures,” says Robin Kelsey, Loeb associate professor of the humanities.
And…
Kelsey views photography as a “hybrid medium” that is both a simple, automatic trace of reality and an intentional composition that fits the Western pictorial tradition: rectangularity, a single viewpoint, perspective, a vanishing point. “You can sit and spend time with a single photograph in a way that I find very gratifying,” he says. “For me, the images reveal themselves only through long and repeated viewings.”
Then..
Today, of course, cell phones and the Internet have made nearly everyone a potential photojournalist. For Kelsey, the ability to disseminate images globally via the Web is a far more significant historical shift than the change from film to digital photography (though they are, of course, technologically related)
The primary lesson: never underestimate the power of images.
As to me, when I want to get a new camera to replace my two years nearly broken Canon Compact, I learned more that photography is not just about brand, or technical specification, or skills. Photography is about understanding. No matter the tools. No matter the condition. Good understanding can create a much better images. I abandoned the purchasing, may be some next few months ahead. Understand photography at its best.
Share: 
