Week 8 Response (insecurity of photographic truth, reflections, and works)

 "Each photographer uses specific equipments in specific ways to record particular slices of reality for particular reasons for certain audiences and certain purpose, all of which are constrained by conventions, permissions, politics, and insecurities."

-Jurgenson page. 96 

When first mention the idea that an image is 'an infinity of contingencies', I thought both in macro and micro truth.

Macro: what make the photography happened? Our existence is accidental miracle; at present, 60% of our own life is caused by uncertain random coincidence. (The first “life” refers to the first life on earth, the second one is everyone's current life and self.) 

How many random coincidence made the beginning microbes our humans? 

Also, How many random coincidence made us now? In Thinking, Fast and Slow, psychologist Daniel Kahneman talks about system 1 and 2 in human's brain: system 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control; system 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. Most of time, our brain operates unconsciously. 

The answer is infinite contingencies.

Micro: how different photographs could be under a fixed time, space, objects? There are so many variables  could make the photos different. In the citation of Ricard Avedon, the lightning, camera angles, lens, filters, emulsions, and frames. 

In the past few weeks, we have explored that images are our documentary of life and way of social communications. Photos were all past, and the taker ourselves could use many strategies to change the informational expression of the images such as active or passive framing. We have also explored whether self portraits and online profiles are real ourselves. 

With all thoughts, I took some photographing over the week to examine how the difference could be between photographs of a fixed time, space, objects by the same camera. 

This photos set under have the same lightning, camera angle, lens, and framing. They are taken by the same camera and I did use filters to modify them. Under unknown circumstances, they have different tones. In contrast, one is yellow warm tone and one is blue cold tones. 

I guess it is because I applied night mode photographing. When the pictures are exposed, my little move changed the results. In the video, you can see the environment outside the framing of the photos. The vision is wider. The feeling of the photos and video is different, they expressed information differently. 

I came to understand that the comparison of "the images in mirror is not truly existing" and "all photographs are accurate, none of them is truth". I agree with the former sentence and deny the latter. The photographs is not truly what I see. It cannot accurately record my real vision. The light in the photographing wasn't that bright in reality. However, the photographs remind me the truth of the darkness. So even if these photos are inaccurate, they can remind me of the truth at that time. Most of us believe what we see in photos at the first glance. However, we realize the difference between photos and reality after careful considerations.

https://youtu.be/z0J461_CQbU

Another set of photographs: the first one is on objective of showing the mirror shades of my 3D prints, the second one is on objective to show myself on the marble surface. I reinforced my existence as a photographer and imply that I created the photo. In fact, I just changed the camera angle. Without the angle change and my shades, I could still demonstrate the reality that I am the taker. 

Thus, photographs is with uncertainty and infinite contingencies, we can figure out the meaning and truth in them. That's how they matters to us. We get what we want from photographs and photographing.