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Essay on family photography
Father and son analysis
Essay on family photography
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Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, explores the stream of consciousness Barthes experiences when viewing his Winter Garden photo. The photo depicts his mother as a child and how Barthes decides to handle the understanding of this image. For this essay my Winter Garden photo will be titled The Father. This essay will be an attempt to work through the ideas and vocabulary used by Barthes in understanding his own photo. In 1995 a photo was taken of my father and myself, referred further as The Father. The operator in the image “the Photographer” (Barthes, 9) is my mother. The subject of the photograph would be my farther and I. This is considered to be the Spectrum or “spectacle”. The viewer, or Spectator “ is ourselves” (Barthes, 9), being me. After establishing the main subjects of the image, Barthes further explores how photographs affect the Spectator. Advenience is “the attraction certain photographs exerted … even adventure” (Barthes, 19). In The Father the temporary adventure would be me seeing myself as a child being held by my father, a reaction …show more content…
In The Father an individual becomes confronted with the idea of what the photograph represents. The confrontation of the photograph being an artificial reproduction of the actual event causes the Spectator to accept the image as being a referent “the person or thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of simulacrum” (Barthes, 9). The referent is also connected to what Barthes states as “ pure contingency”. Pure contingency is the “real” in a photography; the understanding that in The Father the events did happen, but is a replication of the actual event. The Spectator is always experiencing the Punctum of an image, not the actual image, because regardless of how many times the Spectator views the image it is not reality. The second the shutter is released the image
Having such an image before our eyes, often we fail to recognize the message it is trying to display from a certain point of view. Through Clark’s statement, it is evident that a photograph holds a graphic message, which mirrors the representation of our way of thinking with the world sights, which therefore engages other
Camera Lucida was Roland Barthes’ last written piece, published posthumously in 1980. This book deals with the topic of photography and the death of Barthes’ mother in 1977. The role of photography is questioned; he asks what about photography makes it a valid media? We read about the operator (the photographer), spectrum (the subject) and spectator (the viewer), also about the studium (what we see in the photograph) and the punctum (the unclassifiable, the thing that makes the photograph important to the viewer). According to Barthes the photograph is an adventure for the viewer, but it is ultimately death, the recording of something that will be dead after the picture is taken. This idea is the main focus of Barthes’ writing, the photograph “that-has-been”, in Latin “interfuit: what I see has been here, in this place which extends between infinity and the subject; it has been here, and yet immediately separated; it has been absolutely, irref...
The art world of photography is changing all the time. Peter Schjeldahl starts out with a very strong and well written paragraph about the world of art. Peter Schjeldahl says, “You can always tell a William Eggleston photograph. It’s the one in color that hits you in the face and leaves you confused and happy, and perhaps convinces you that you don’t understand photography nearly as well as you thought you did”. These couple of sentences are very strong and flow so well together, and they grab the reader’s attention. Peter explains how William Eggleston was known as a great American photographer.
John Mahtesian's photography offers a visual poetry of the human condition. It is a direct expression of his warmth, depth of spirit, and humanity. A true gentleman, extremely humble and unfailingly polite, he achieves an invisibility that is the success of his art. His patience and commitment to his vision allow him to capture moments others could not. If his subjects are aware of his presence, his gentle nature so enchants them that they are unguarded and their essence is revealed. So compelling are his images that we are truly convinced his insights are our own. They make us rejoice in the world around us, and in the nature of human existence.
Susan Sontag said photographs sends across the harmlessness and helplessness of the human life steering into their own ruin. Furthermore the bond connecting photography with departure from life tortures the human race. (Sontag 1977:64)
In “My Papa’s Waltz,” Roethke uses imagery to portray the relationship between the father and his son. As Roethke describes the dance shared between a father and his son, the narrator creates a scene full of affectionate memories. The narrator provides a child-like glimpse back into a time shared between a father and his son as they danced across the kitchen floor. Throughout the poem, images of a hard-working father are created as Roethke writes of the roughness of the father’s hand that are “battered on one knuckle” (10) and “a palm caked hard by dirt” (14). As the father and son “romped” (5) in the middle of the kitchen despite the mother’s “countenance” (7), the vision of the father’s affectionate, carefree and fun relationship with his son is a cherished memory to the ...
It appears to me that pictures have been over-valued; held up by a blind admiration as ideal things, and almost as standards by which nature is to be judged rather than the reverse; and this false estimate has been sanctioned by the extravagant epithets that have been applied to painters, and "the divine," "the inspired," and so forth. Yet in reality, what are the most sublime productions of the pencil but selections of some of the forms of nature, and copies of a few of her evanescent effects, and this is the result, not of inspiration, but of long and patient study, under the instruction of much good sense…
She starts by bringing a pessimistic view to photographs of nature, by describing what may or may not lie just outside the boundaries of the picture. Mockingly she leads the reader to assume that there are no real nature photos left in the world, but rather only digitaly enhanced photos of nature wit...
The camera is presented as a living eye in her work, capable of bending and twisting, contorting reality in its own light. It is at the same time a sensuous device, one that exp...
This essay will seek to outline my findings on movie and theatre by looking at still image and moving image. I will discuss the relationship between cinema and film, and also compare some works of artists in order to answer the question which how might photography be contextualized as image on the threshold of still and moving – as an object incorporating the temporal and the narrative, the writing of history, or the presentation of documentation as record.
In the book, the Barthes creates some terms. Operator, Spectator and Spectrum are the first one. The Operator means the photographer, the viewer who looks at the Photograph becomes the Spectator and the thing emitted by subject is called eidolon(image, phantom, ghost), in other word the Spectrum. Barthes talks about Operator’s ability to take the picture of naturalness from the situation. He says that a Photograph is closer to the Spectator than the Operator and the Spectrum is the closest one. The stream of his thought naturally moves from the subject of the picture to viewers with excluding the person taking a picture. It was interesting for the artists like me because for artists, the subject matter goes first and then the work is created later. Particularly, for me, considering viewers mostly comes at the end or sometime, I even ignore the audience. For a viewer like Barthes, seeing the work is a completely opposite way to creating the work.
In this essay I will discuss how the visual film children of men, by Alfonso Curon shows us that the self is an ever changing thing. We see this through the main character Theo as throughout the film he develops and changes dramatically as a person, as himself. This is seen through the film techiques of tracking shot/establishing shot, High angle shot and dialogue.
It is also possible to sense some dissolution in the Moonlight. The portrait indicates a nocturnal landscape that somehow completes a part of the chronicle from his personal life and struggle. It is also easy to relate the portrait to the artist’s personal struggle with the coherence of the landscape, with main focus being the artist’s sense of crisis that subjectively attempted to explain his disenchanted history.
In Sontag’s On Photography, she claims photography limits our understanding of the world. Though Sontag acknowledges “photographs fill in blanks in our mental pictures”, she believes “the camera’s rendering of reality must always hide more than it discloses.” She argues photographs offer merely “a semblance of knowledge” on the real world.
In this essay I will investigate the idea that photography has become a part of one’s everyday life, when we are taking a photograph we are actual taking a memory and making it ‘Immortal’. Freezing a portion of one’s life also becomes a social activity and the reason that one would pick up a camera and snap that ‘important’ event, would seem to be a very ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ part of one’s life, we also seem to think that it gives one an opportunity to be ‘accepted’ into today’s society, social networking sites have become the hart of the social climax of our forever snapping community. It was estimated there is over 16 billion photos on instergram [__]. We also seem to be documenting one’s life and using that frozen moment to express are feelings, such as joy, excitement, anger, proud(?) or even love. We also use photography in are society as a why to pass information, its become a massive part of are social network. To do this I will be looking at how humanity throughout history have photographed parts of their lives to create a memory, a ‘immortal’ memory.