This was my favorite chapter so far, and many interesting points were brought up. One that stood out to me was hegemony in the representation of photography. It takes resources to get your work visible in the main stream, so the images presented will be limited by the people who are able to get their work distributed in such a way and what their goals are. In our economic structure, as this chapter pointed out, that goal is often to sell something.
Advertising used to be the art of communicating why your product was better than all of its competitors. However, much more subversive methods are utilized today. A popular tactic is to make the viewer feel inadequate in some way usually about something highly personal, visceral, or culturally significant. Things like your sexual life, body-image, or mental happiness. Photographs are usually about more than just what is in the frame. There's the context in which it was taken and in which it is being read, the intentions of the photographer, and in this chapter particularly also the industry supporting it. In images taken, selected, and modified for advertisements, I think the intentions are selfish, context is vain, and industry is bloated. Photography itself is not to blame, as it is a medium of communication, and perhaps we just need better things to communicate and better communities to do it with. However, since the photo is an image, photography may be a particularly easy medium to use when someone only wants to show the surface, whether that objectifies women or conceals labor relations. The art of photography then, I think, is to sculpt that connotative image that lies beyond the borders of the picture into something worthwhile.
Q: Does viewing hyper-real glamourous images of people function to reduce our perspective of real people into just images of people?
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