Squiers’ essay about Life magazine begins with explaining the origins of mass media magazines in Europe and how this style of photojournalism and documentary spread to America, although America had adopted a different approach of illustration their news and opinions. Squiers discusses her opinion of Life magazine and how it influenced the lives of readers and American culture into the culture that we experience today. she mentions a few articles that illustrate the Patriarchal influences and viewpoints of the magazine and also explores how they represented various groups of people at certain times throughout history (e.g. the black society during the Integrations in schools, women and men as represented from a contest for Miss America).

The introduction to ‘The Photographers Eye’  explores how John Szarkowski influenced Formalism as a mode of illustration in photography and how this was magnified by the exhibitions that would occur in San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in concentration of the Formalist ideals. The photography and art chosen at the time of Szarkowski’s  directorship in the museum heavily directed the theories and ideals of the time in art: everything was strictly approached in terms of its shapes and composition of shapes ignoring any context or any depiction of reality.

“The formalist attitude was everywhere in American art, embodied in what Irving Sandler has described as the sensibility of antianthropocentrism, a concern with objects above human emotion and human experience.”

This text by David Campany explains how the still life photography has been evident throughout the medium from the very beginnings when Daguerre contrived his arrangement s of sculptures and William henry Fox Talbot exhibited his china and glassware as well as his fruit bowl. Campany also discusses the distinction between the still life photography that could be labelled as art and mentions that many photographers “insisted their medium was not art but it could be an art.”

“This indirect path to artistic status produced extraordinary images – and they could only have been made that way.”

References to Roland Barthes 1964 essay, ‘Rhetoric of the Image’ is also mentioned as he starts to discuss the commerce aspect of still life photography intended to represent a specific and particular view of an object; an ideology of the object that allows audiences to believe in the object. The key effective reason that results in this ideology of objects stems from the belief in audiences that the photographic medium is a truthful medium: “It is unique in appearing to point at things transparently (‘there it is’) while fashioning appearance artificially (‘this is how it is’)”

“But a less remarked legacy of Pop was the polarizing of art’s attitudes to commerce into rictus-grin irony or high- minded disgust. It led to a fraught attitude to money, to the commodity status of art works themselves and, indirectly, to a stand- off between art photography and applied photography.”

During the lecture today with David Campany, there was a wide discussion concerning where photography has come from and essentially what is is as well as why we, as a humanity have chosen this medium to express both ourselves and other ideas or cultures. It’s interesting to me the different perspectives many writers, historians and photographers have brought into the history or histories of photography - definitely makes me excited to be apart of it and to read these perspectives.