Roland Barthes - Extracts from Camera Lucida
Honestly I found this passage extremely hard to follow. I tried multiple times to read through it but struggled understanding it.
The concept from this passage that I enjoyed the most was the idea that once you take a photograph that the thing that photograph represents is essentially dead. This is rather interesting because of the truth behind it. If I were to take a photograph of myself right now I would never be that person in that photography again. Just by taking the photograph the events that I had been through had changed. It's a deep and intriguing theory to think about.
Hito Steyerl - In Defense of the Poor Image
Overall this was a very interesting topic to think about. We see such butchered versions of photos every day that we have become numb to pixelated images and blur. The recommended file size for web is around 72 dpi, in jpeg form. Which as a photographer who drools at high resolution images and gets giddy when their pictures are so tack sharp that you can count the subject's blackheads, is an extremely painful size to compress down to. We are willingly to sacrifice quality for speed and storage purposes. I think that with today's society pictures aren't always sent or uploaded with the idea of being looked at as art but rather as a representation of something. Like Memes for example, I don't know of anyone who looks at a meme with the desire for it ot be of a file size that they could print out and mount on their wall. Instead these files are just used to get an idea across.
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