The excerpt by Susan Sontag is a fascinating read, she has a very graceful way of speaking about the aspects of photography, what photography is, its purpose, and how photography became a form of art from an "artistic activity". The first quote I pulled from the excerpt is, "What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like painting and drawings. Photographs do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire." I never looked at the difference between painting and photography this way, I always saw them both as interpretations of what the artist wants the viewer to see. But photography is that and the reality behind that interpretation. Also, anyone can create photographs by picking up a camera, especially today with our cell phones.
The paragraph the second quote was taken from stuck out to me. "Photographs...themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out...they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging." Graphic designers do a lot of manipulation to photographs and we are taught that we have to correct photos so that they fit into a corporate identity. Some companies, especially cosmetic and beauty-based companies do use photographs in their packaging to appeal to the buyer, but those images are not the reality that photographs are supposed to depict. This brings me back to the first quote, where Sontag describes photographs as "miniatures of reality", but that is not the case for everything in this world.
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