saw a presentation today on Susan Sontag's view of photography and history. the recent (since mid 1800s) rise of photos as a dominant, determinant way of telling us what our history is. we don't question photos the way we question written words. even though we all know how subjective it is to decide when and what to photograph, and we all know how easy it is (especially in our photoshopped era) to manipulate an image. - Sontag starts with Plato's Cave metaphor. but i'm more interested in the idea that photos, like all history, are editorials. and to take a photo is not only to capture an event, but an event itself. some of this is coded into the vocabulary. frame, lens, crop - these are ways of saying how we limit what is included in the photo. science and journalism want to be objective forms of knowledge: they pretend to have no perspective (sometimes they claim to have all perspectives at once, a perfect form of knowledge). a photograph always has perspective, by de
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