say cheese...

Thursday's lecture was the best ever, entitled "Modernity, Sociology and Photography', it examined the emergence of photogrpahy coinciding with modernity and the uses of photography within sociology and, indeed, the sociology of photography. It asked the questions that I think about obssesively; 'does photography create reality or does photography reflect reality?', 'what codes and conventions, what cultural norms do we express when we take a photo?', what are we saying by the things we omit from a photo and what we choose to include?' And we looked at how photography is used by sociologists and by the state.

In photogrpahy practice on Friday we spent all morning 'reading' photographs and again asking the question 'when I take a photograph what am I expressing most to my audience; the object I am photographing, or myself?' We considered how photography is grounded in the memory-we understand the message of a photograph because it expresses truths and ideas that we know and can connect with. Therefore, photography is one of the few arts that does not sit well with postmodernity. It relies too much on knowledge of truth.

My quote of the week is "The camera never tells the truth. In fact, it is so adept at lying it is practically sociopathic.'

Honestly, the phrase 'the camera never lies' is an absoulte load of er, poo. Of course it lies. We select, we choose, we construct and then we take the picture. Indeed, the photo constructs reality. It does not reflect it.

I spent all afternoon in the darkrooms trying to get 1 print of a picture 'just so' and i was finally happy with it. I can'[t help but feel that this is the real art of photography. The manual, film loading camera and the fiddling around for hours in a darkroom...i love it. And my poor super dooper Canon EOS 10D camera is feeling a little hurt right now that I would rather play with chemicals that stick a piece of wire from it into my computer...though im not saying there isn't art in this.

So, where will this lead...who knows!! but it's very very very very (thats enough very's) cool!