Sontag Essay

1. The nation is at war, and your number in the recently reinstated military draft has just come up. The problem is that, after serious reflection, you have concluded that the war is unjust. What advice might Socrates give you? Would you agree? What might you decide to do? Read the Introduction, Chapter 2 Crito and the Conclusion Chapter 40 Phaedo by Plato.

It is said that “The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play not with form but with time”. This makes me think that the real content of a picture, which is what the photographer tried to express, is not evident to perceive unless an explanatory text is provided. In fact, I believe that our perceptions of pictures changes over time as the historical context do. In addition, our opinions are never fixed as they are influenced by our environment. Therefore, when looking at a particular picture at a given time, it is certain that our perception of it will be different in the future based on what happen between the first time and second time we saw it.

The truth is that photography really does limit our understanding of the world. Although others may argue that photography deepens their understanding of the world around us, this “world” is the world that the photographer creates. The world that photography shows us is not the entire world, as there is more to see. Photography highly limits the understanding of our world in ways that we were not even aware of. The manipulation of images, showing an unreal world through images, not being able to experience what the photographer experienced, and replacing going places by looking at photographs are ways of how we are limited by photography.

This story is about a young women named Molly Macneil and her young son Alan. They live in a town called Broughton which is located in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Broughton is a small town where most of its male inhabitants work at the colliery. Molly is a very lonely women who has been taking on the role of a single mother for the last four years because her husband has been away. Her husband, Archie Macneil, is in the United States following his boxing career. Molly also feels she has to keep this a secret from Alan because she wants him to grow up to be a doctor not a boxer. She will only tell Alan that her father has gone to make money for them and will return when he is finished. She also tells him that his father is

Matt Lamkin’s “A Ban On Brain-Boosting Drugs is Not the Answer” first appeared in Chronicle of Higher Education in 2011. In this essay Lamkin aims to convince his reader not to deter improper conduct with threats, but to encourage students to engage in the practice of education. Lamkin tells us “If colleges believe that enhancing cognition with drugs deprives students of the true value of education, they must encourage students to adapt that value as their own” (642). Appeal to logic, consistency, and compare/contrast are techniques Lamkin skillfully uses to create a strong effective essay.

In Freeman Patterson’s Barriers to Seeing, Patterson mentions a quote from Susan Sontag about cameras and experiences. Sontag writes, “‘A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it – by limiting the experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting into an image, a souvenir’” (Paragraph 12). Essentially, Sontag is elaborating how people are distracted from their surroundings and experiences to find a photogenic picture or to record what they think to be an experience. While the objective of photography is usually to capture an experience or feeling, many are instead obsessed with finding good lighting, searching for a good background, and are focused on taking the best picture to post on social media. In many cases this is very true, and I myself can see it in people’s photos as well as my own. In Freeman Patterson’s Barriers to Seeing,” he quotes Susan Sontag’s statement that one’s camera can be a barrier to seeing and experiencing a moment. Through other’s picture taking as well

What do you think motivated the authors of these images to publish them? Answer in four to five sentences.

On September 1, the Senate Bill 4 (SB4), signed by Governor Abbott, went into full effect. This Senate Bill, to sum things up, the ban of sanctuary cities in Texas. A sanctuary city can vary its definition from place to place, but generally, it is a city that limit their cooperation with immigration enforcement. However, with the SB4, now it lets a police officer ask about a person’s immigration status while they/re being detained instead of when they’re arrested. Many arguments have occurred during the past months about these sanctuary cities and whether it is right to keep, or to ban. I believe that Governor Abbott had every right to sign that bill. The SB4 bill was very necessary.

The photograph is a very powerful medium. The French painter Paul Delaroche exclaimed upon seeing an early photograph “from now on, painting is dead!” (Sayre, 2000). Many critics did not take photography seriously as a legitimate art form until the 20th century. With the

Our memories often time embellish the memories we once had of such great people, places, times, and etc. We live these times up to standard that makes us reminisce, hurt, contemplate and so much more. The power of a photograph has been described to have worth a thousand words, metaphorically meaning of course, that what an image can capture in one instance, something that may not ever be captured through words. For too many centuries we have been without, what many of us now take for granted, the photograph. What we capture in a picture, has much more value than we often time see in our commercials, people, places, they tell a story to the ignorant, paint a picture for blind, give the deaf something to listen to, and so much more.

In conclusion, although there’s gap between how general society see, understand， accept and engage in documentary photography, Rosler believed that it’s better to find out a method that not only retain criticism about social culture but also run a countering practice of photography.

Today, people build their own pyramids and write their own hieroglyphs. This means that humans have the power to create words and symbols in today’s society. For example, people came up with phrases such as yolo, FML, and Amazeballs. Yolo has gotten serious attention from America citizens so all dictionaries ended up adding the phrase “Yolo”, etc. For example, Rosen supports her claim that since “the average person sees tens of thousands of images in the course of a day” (Rosen 354), people have a difficult time actually finding a meaning for the image. Society is becoming more of an image based culture rather than a textual one. DeGhett would respond to Rosen’s argument by saying that “today’s controversies often center on the vast abundance of disturbing photographs, and the difficulty of putting them in a meaningful context” (DeGhett 13). In so doing, DeGhett is supporting Rosen by stating that Americans have a dull emotional understanding when it comes to war photos (DeGhett 13). The war photo that Jarecke had taken wasn’t published for six months after it was taken. Unfortunately by that time it was published, its purpose was lost. DeGhett included another photo editor that believes that “the decision to not publish Jarecke’s photo was less about protecting readers than preserving the dominant narrative of the good, clean war” (DeGhett 12).

Son, like Paul D, searches for meaning in himself, but his search is impeded by meeting a beautiful light-skinned black model named Jadine. He struggles to balance his love for Jadine with his hunger for self-discovery, and the two goals contradict each other. He meets her on Isle des Chevaliers, but he connects with the slaves who worked on the island before he even meets her. As he approaches the island, “He could see very little of the land … he was gazing at the shore of an island that, three hundred years ago, had struck slaves blind the moment they saw it” (Morrison 8). The narrator’s comparison of Son to the slaves is one that illustrates his connection to his black roots and his desire to learn more about them. He is not struck

She defamiliarizes the usual photos of miserable and damaged animals by placing herself as the subject of animal testing. By creating a spectacle of herself, she draws curiosity to viewers through her unconventional manner of depicting animal testing. The viewer can only retreat to shock at realizing that an actual person was suffering and struggling in response to the action of animal testing. Although Sontag argues that avoiding the “spectacle” makes the purpose of the photo/exhibit more effective, this may only apply to that of familiar exposure, such as war photos.

Photographs are used to document history, however selected images are chosen to do so. Often times these images graphically show the cruelty of mankind. In her book, Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag asks, "What does it mean to protest suffering, as distinct from acknowledging it?" To acknowledge suffering is just to capture it, to point it out and show somebody else that it exists. In order to protest suffering, there has to be some sort of moral decision that what is shown in the photograph is wrong, and a want from the viewer to change that.