The beginning of this section emphasizes how distinguishing between artistic photography, photojournalism, and amateur picture snapping has become a lot more complicated, and I was suddenly reminded of a bizarre situation that depth to this debate.
A few days following Hurricane Sandy, I was flicking through TV stations and stumbled across one of my best friends photographs on News 8. The photo had been taken from instagram, and it was a tinted "artsy" looking shot of one of the many houses in my town that was totally wrecked by the storm. I called her the next day to remark on how cool I thought it was that her photo made the news and she had no idea what I was talking about, but she did say she had spontaneously acquired tons of new followers on instagram, all of which seeemed to be artists or photographers of some kind.
Its interesting to me that even though they were looking at the same picture, what my friend considered to be a photograph of "something that looked cool", News8 was advertising as photojournalism, while her new instagram followers saw it as "art". It goes to show that since photography relies on technology, which is rapidly advancing everyday, its role in culture is far more complex than any other artistic form
Another aspect of the reading that really made me think was the theoretical idea that acts of looking and recording can never truly be neutral because the very act of taking a photograph must be inspired by attributing a meaning to whatever image you wish to capture, and this intended meaning creates a bias. I really like the idea of semiological analysis because it suggests that all artistic forms can be interpreted as literature, a cluster of symbol which convey a specific meaning partially due to authorial intention but also partially due to reader/viewer interpretation. This intersection of artist/viewer is especially complex with documentary photography because it presents an illusion of neutrality and thus the meaning is more potent.
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