Sum of the Weekend

 Saturday Night 9-28

Do we look smart? 9-29

Chapter 7 Cotton

 The title of the chapter "Revived and Remade" sums up the entire chapter well.  Cotton discusses photographers who use iconic symbols, characters, and techniques to transform contemporary art.  The first section is devoted to artists like Yasumasa Morimura who take on character persona's that are recognizable by society.  Morimura is easily recognizable as people like Van Gough, though a viewer would likely not recognize Morimura over Van Gough in the image.  Other artists recreate popular images in order to question choices made by the original artists.  Collier Schorr's work interested me in the way that the work was presented.  It showed the original 'iconic image' alongside Schorr's work bringing and outside viewer into the process of the other artist.  It openly questioned the intimate relationship Wyeth (the original artist) had with the models.  The rest of the chapter focused on technique revival and renewal, going back to the most basic technique, photogram.

Susan Sontag on Photography

Sontag's article "On Photography"  discusses how photography has changed over time.  She says that today photography is "the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present".  I was really interested in her discussion on early photography as a surveillance tool that showed, during the early years of photography (1870's all the way into the 20th century), images were incontrovertible truth.  Where most art shows an interpretation of the truth, photography blurs the line between truth and art.  She separates photography from painting for its ability to capture such large scale as well as large numbers of people, however she does go on to explain the ways that photography has turned into an everyday hobby like other art forms.  Though she clearly states that photography is an easy way of expierencing, "A photograph is not just the result of an encounter between an event and a photographer" but an event itself.  I think that is one of the biggest developments in photography, the ability to accept photos as not just capturing a moment, but actually being the reason for the moment.  To me that seemed to read as one of the reasons photography is now taken as an art form.