1. Chapter 5: "Spectacles and Illusions" - I have taken multiple classes examining culture and systems of power, and I am very interested in how photography has been utilized to both sell the commodity culture and to fight against it. As a form of communication, photographs, especially on the scale of commercial photography, can offer a window into the dominant values of a culture and its institutions. Moreover, I'm interested in the public mental health issues created by living in a place with pictures that perpetuate certain values.
2. Chapter 2: "Surveyors and surveyed" - Pictures are documents in a way that help tell a story, in which case, it is important to keep in mind the motivation of the people documenting something like war or poverty, just like you would want to know from what perspective is a history book being written. I'm interesting in this chapter because, even though the photograph itself could arguably be considered an unbiased recording of the world, the theory and context behind it are not.
3. Chapter 7: "Photography in the age of electronic imaging" - What first drew me to this chapter was one of the sub-sections, "The early 1990s and the worries about truth." I remember that during the recent Presidential election, a common theme was whether what one of the candidates said was true or not. It seems odd that many times people cannot even agree on what the reality is or isn't. I'm interested to see how the truth of photography has been affected as the means to alter or fake them have gotten easier.
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