I learned very quickly that there are far more aspects to photography than I thought. Photography can be used very differently and it can be interpreted very differently. At first I agreed with Pinny and thought that it was impossible to know who people are by a photograph but the more I thought about it I felt otherwise. Spraque makes some very good points using the examples from the people in western Africa about how some photos have less truth than others. I found Crarys piece to be very confusing but I think it is important to have a base as far where photography comes from.
Crary gives us a deep analysis into vision and how it has an effect on photography. It discusses vision as is was understood from back in the 1820’s which makes it a little hard to follow. The concept of the observer is largely stressed and raises a good question as to how much the observer of the photograph matters to the photograph. Spraque talks about West Africans using photography to depict themselves the way they want to be depicted. Setting up the photo and posing for it. By doing this the photo isn’t a true glimpse of what these people are like, rather a depiction of how they want to be viewed. This does not give a very accurate view of the truth. Even though we can learn some about these people and their culture through these photographs, we still do not have an accurate idea of what life is like for them. Pinny goes into this idea of the truth being displayed in a photo. The piece talks about how we want a linguistic explanation on what the picture means. The picture alone is not enough. It is this urge that makes photography unable to be trusted. The interesting concept posed of how different a bunch of still shots from a movie look if one had not seen the movie. The idea of bringing up an actually memory rather than using the photo as the only info you have. One cannot make assumptions as to who someone is just based on their facial expression in a photo. But then again can you see what kind of person someone is through a photograph? How true are photographs? Can we use photographs as a way of gaining information or should they simply be left to just bring up memories?
