Photography

We've reached the photography unit of my composition class and were assigned to read Susan Sontag's essay "In Plato's Cave". It is all about photography and underlying issues related to picture-taking. One quote in particular stuck out to me, "the camera's rendering of reality must always hide more than it discloses". This is basically just a scholarly way of saying that pictures lie. After reading this essay I agree whole-heartedly with her on this, and I don't see how anyone can disagree. Everyone knows the cliche story of the family portrait. The big smiles hiding the fact that the husband is cheating, the 14 year old daughter is doing drugs, the 12 year old son is getting picked on at school, and the mother is contemplating suicide. Yes, I know this is an exxaggeration and I am in no way saying that this is true of all families. However, no family is perfect, yet that is the image that is captured by the camera. When anyone sees that photo they will see a happy couple with two beautiful children, living the American dream: the ideal family with 2.5 children, 1 dog, and a white picket fence. The moral of this story: cameras are the biggest liars. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, yet not even a quarter of those words describe the surface. The real words, the ones that give the picture true meaning are the ones that are never spoken, the words lingering below the surface and never see the light.
I have no idea why I felt the need to refelct on that, but I did. So there it is. I'm going to go finish revising my formal response to the essay now (which doesn't actually include any of what I just said lol)