Sontag Reading

 Daniel Guiller

Professor Cacoilo

Studio research 1

16 February 2023

Sontag Reading

“Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out.”

“Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it.”

I enjoyed reading Sonia Sontag's views on photography from the perspective of a writer and photographer. I agreed with a lot of the points she made about the uses of photography and the purpose photos exist. Her reasoning reminds me of the Decisive Moment by Henri Cartier Bresson, which talks about the photographic process from start to finish.

INTRODUCTION SELFIE (INSPIRED)

Hello all, my name is Daniel Guiller, and I'm a photo major. Photography shapes my life because I see the world in images and I try to capture things that I picture in my mind, for the purpose of documentation or reproduction. I create images that visually make one think about the subject or groups of photos that tell a story. Before discovering photography I was an illustrator and I used drawings to create images that I would imagine, and now I use film and digital photography to translate my ideas.

One of the artists I chose to study was Michael Rakowitz, a three-dimensional artist from New York City who uses mixed media. He uses recycled materials from food packaging and scrapbooking to make large murals or three-dimensional sculptures depicting religious icons. I am drawn to his work because it reminded me of the early artwork I did in mixed media collage. His work is excellent because of his masterful renderings and combination of drawing, painting, and sculpture. 

Work Cited

Sontag, S. (n.d.). On Photography. Susan Sontag. Retrieved February 16, 2023, from http://www.susansontag.com/SusanSontag/books/onPhotographyExerpt.shtml