How to do Things with Pictures

A really interesting way to kind of come full circle with all the images we've seen and to really start thinking about what photographs do, from their captions, to the way they've been played around with and "photoshopped". I especially liked the part concerning captions, since we've been dealing with that in class. I think a part that kind of falls under this category is Author as well (Sherri Levine after Walker Evans: did we see or interpret or get a different feeling from her images versus Walker Evans? despite the fact that they were the same photograph?) Also it this concept tied in with the images we looked at by Greg L. ( i forget his name..) that were labelled this photograph empasizes my black features vs the white features. Just the captioning alone led us so start understanding the pictures differently, despite the fact that they were the same photograph again. This article reminded me of a recent movie called Vantage Point where it is once incident of the US president getting shot but then you view the movie from different people's vantage point. There is ultimately one truth but the "author's" vantage point, or belief, or collection of ideas and goals leads to different understandings of an image or incident in the movie's case. I found it interesting that despite all of this photo's still become our frame of reference for somethings, where we find truth in them and trust them. "Just as pointing the finger indicates something real out there, so does the pointing camera... so a photograph ALWAYS tells us that something was actually out there", that something happened, that what is shown is truth. I wanted to put that quote next to cindy sherman's photographs where she titles them untitled film stills, indicating that yes, these ARE from a movie, yet we know that that never happened, there is no movie.. but the photograph shows somehting happening, there's an actress, there's a set, there's an untitled movie title, and there's a film still! Yet, there is no film. I thought the paradox of both of them placed side by side was interesting.