Reading #8

Just being very honest, I did not enjoy this reading of what "photographers wish they had learned in school" at all.

This cliche list of "I wish I could have. . ." loses its point when it gets to number 7: "you don't have to be perfect". That's right. No one will ever be perfect. As this article mentions in the beginning, we learn a lesson "the hard way" and, in my opinion, that is the ONLY way to learn anything. Learning what's on this list while still being a student will surely help me, but it won't make me a more prepared photographer at the age of 22.
I just like to cherish and focus on what's given today. As long as I make best of what I can do today, I will have no such regret like "what I wish I learned in the past. . ."

Lastly, if the very last quote of this article, "I wish somebody had told me that I would spend 95% of my time doing office tasks and only 5% of my time actually taking and processing photographs", is true, I won't become a photographer.  

Reading #6

John Szarkowski teach us very important ways of understanding photographs and photography. I underlined a few interesting phrases from this reading.

“The subject and the picture were not the same thing, although they would afterwards seem so.”

- I feel like “photography = reality” is the most misunderstood concept of photography. Even so-called documentary photographs are just as interpretive as paintings or any other visual art. In fact, it surprisingly distorts reality so much. By freezing one moment on a piece of paper (or on a screen), it completely ignores the context of what happened in reality.

“The decline of narrative painting in the past century has been ascribed in large part of the rise of photography, which “relieved” the painter of the necessity of story telling.”

- It is always interesting to see how photography has changed the way we look at the world. Just anything “visual” has changed because of photography. Did photography really get rid of painters’ burden? Is photography a big influence on abstract paintings?      

“ . . . the decisive moment, but the phrase has been misunderstood; the thing that happens at the decisive moment is not a dramatic climax, but a visual one. The result is not a story but a picture.”

- This well-known term “the decisive moment” is still quite vague to me.  However, reading Szarkowski, I can understand that the result is really just the photograph, not a story. I remember the guest photographer we had a few weeks ago, David Farmerie was very focused on having a story in photographs. Does a photograph tell you a story, or is it just a photograph?