#jasminewu

The way that the two pieces are similar yet different was really interesting to me. From the beginning of both pieces, I was immediately struck by the difference how they talk about the color. Jarmon (On Seeing Red) uses shorter, more dramatic sentences, drawing attention to the word red, often starting sentence with it. Solnit (The Blue of Distance) weaves the word and its qualities into the sentences, so that you almost don't notice when she mentions it. In a pretty direct way, they speak of the color the way we perceive the color - red is bold; it grabs your attention, and it is difficult to ignore. On other hand, you can see blue everywhere without really stopping to recognize the color.

I also wanted to note that the ideas in the Blue of Distance where fascinating to me, and I especially loved this quote:

I honestly didn't fully understand the poem - I found the writing a little confusing. Eliot speaks in a lot of allusions and metaphors, and I wasn't quite able to keep up.

I had never thought about the characteristics and traditions associated with a "poor image" before, and it was interesting to actually hear it analyzed and discussed. On one hand, it seemed to be somewhat synonymous with accessibility - "poor images" are often the duplicated, compressed, easily transferable version of higher quality files. This idea of accessibility also exists in situations where there is no "higher quality" version - in situations where there isn't an organized distribution of a piece of media, or if it is not allowed, all we have are these "poor images".

With accessibility and the internet, these poor images also become a connector between many people, something that many people have seen and can bond over. In this sense, it not only has implications on an individual, but a society as well.

There was one section that was interesting to me - there was a situation where there wasn't a projector good enough to show certain clips, so the speaker wouldn't show them. If you had been the creator of a piece of work, would you want it to be distributed as widely as possible, or only distributed at the original quality?

What are your reactions to this quote, and what it says about culture and society?

I really enjoyed the essay and how Baldwin discussed so many parts of his life, from his father, to his experiences with race, to his childhood. It all seemed to be from a distant, reflective lens, and he seems to look back on situations with objectivity while acknowledging that he may not have been objective in the moment.

I thought it was interesting that he seemed to provide an explanation for his father's bitterness with explicitly saying so (I think). He spends a long time discussing how his father seemed to be angry as a result of his disconnect from the world and from people around him. He then goes on to discuss his own "first times" being the victim of racism, where people refused to serve him, called him names, made him feel unsafe, etc. I had thought that he was going to state that this was his own theory on why his father had become so bitter, but I don't think he ever did.

Question 1: Do people feel the same way about the theory on how Baldwin's dad become the way he did or have other theories they picked up on throughout the essay?

Magnum was a co-op founded after the second world war, in an age where (paraphrasing from the Magnum history section) cameras were becoming smaller but people's minds were becoming bigger, yearning to see, share, and express more of the world. I found the history and ideology really intriguing - they aimed to give talented photographers a space and opportunity to have more direction and influence over their projects and images, rather than the traditional roles where they were just handed assignments.

In the history section, they featured a couple photographs by Eve Arnold. On Magnum's site, many of her "featured"/for sale photographs are portraits of very famous people - Marilyn Monroe, Malcolm X, Andy Warhol, the Queen, etc. However, she became well known through a collection of images she took in China, a few of which are still among her most famous images.

Below are my favorites among her more well known images.

I really loved looking at the experiences that Sebastiao Salgado had, and looking at the pictures he took. I thought it was a perfect example of the discussion we had in class about how photography can democratize the world, by showing the public these cultures and societies that we never would have experienced otherwise, whether it was those that were searching for gold or the natives in South America. These images not only serve to show us things we don't know, but also show us how much of the world we don't know about.

I really enjoyed the later part of the documentary as well, which shows Salgado's traveling the world to capture the beauty of nature and our planet. It feels especially relevant during this era where we've recognized the danger our planet is in.

Robert Frank was a Swiss photographer and filmmaker. He lived mostly in the 1900s, and was most famous for a book titled The Americans (The Rotch Library had this book, but I couldn't find it in the shelves). He used 35mm b&w photography to capture images seemed to represent the world in a raw, unedited way.

Many felt like he was a pioneer in documentary photography, as Frank captured the world in a more personal way that other documentarians had before, who had often been trying to use photos as a vehicle to make a political statement.

This book, titled Hold Still, Keep Going is a printed version of a exhibit he had which explored the relationship between still photography and film. There are many mini collections of images, anywhere between 2-15 photos that are all clearly taken seconds apart, whether they were reframed or stills chosen off a filmstrip. Some of them have words in/written over them or have captions around them.

Each of these images appealed to me for different reasons. I felt that some of them conveyed a feeling very effectively, while others I just thought were very pleasing to the eye (proper contrast, framing, etc). The second to last has a story that goes along side it which has impact on the perception oof the images, and the very last one I didn't quite understand so I thought I'd include it to share with others.

I really enjoyed this piece, which to me really was represented by the title- a short history of photography. Not only does he go through the different technologies over time, he also talks about the implications of the level of photography with the kind of photos that were produced and the way it interacted with the culture and society at the time.