Reading Response 2

Nowadays, almost everyone has a camera in their hands at any given time. With the increased reliance on social media as a means of receiving attention, our instincts as social media users overpower our instincts as photographers. For instance, a popular trend that most of us have come across at one point walking down the streets of New York City is sidewalk art– drawings, paintings, or graffiti similar to the one shown below, which I took a photo of as I was walking near Madison Avenue. While these artistic pieces are not considered photography themselves, the artists, through their street art, encourage pedestrians to stop and to snap a photograph of the sidewalk display. Many of these observers later upload their findings to social media or share them with other friends and family. 

By encouraging almost every pedestrian who passes by to participate in the art of photography, the original artist brings his work to life through the hands and minds of the hundreds of New Yorkers. Every person who comes across this sidewalk art and decides to take a photograph, or even those who decide it is not beautiful enough to take a photo of, suddenly becomes a “director, stage, and costume designer, make-up artist” (Martinique), but this form of photography is somewhat different from the allegory of “Plato’s Cave” in the way that Sonia Sontag describes the art of photography in her piece, On Photography. In her analogy, the photographic world consists of a series of “unrelated, freestanding particles… and faits divers” (Sontag, 17), or “miscellaneous facts.” However, with street art, the same so-called “particle” is captured, yet each photo is unique. Each photographer establishes “a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge– and, therefore, like power” (Sontag, 12)

This form of photography, which derives its nature from an artist who left a piece of himself on the street and may never knowingly come across his photographers, is a testament to Sontag’s idea that photographers are “still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience” (Sontag, 4) No two photos of the same piece of art will ever be the same because embedded into each rendition is a reflection of the photographer’s own identity. The distance from the art, the highlights, the lighting, the shadows, the saturation are all details that make each relationship between object and photographer distinct. However, depending on social media to dictate for us when and how a photo is taken strips us of that freedom and identity. We become confined to the rules of social media trends and, more generally, society. The beauty and story behind each photo is what drives people to post their work on social media. As a result, individuals begin to limit themselves by “search[ing] only for the photogenic” (Sontag, 6) As social media users adopt this mindset of valuing only the surroundings that are beautiful and good enough for their feed, they reject everything that is ugly, “naughty,” “disreputable, taboo, marginal” (Sontag, 9), which is the true essence of photography. Photography is meant to capture a thought and allow that relationship between the photographer and photo to exist. When we capture thoughts only to post them on social media for others to see, we only capture a superficial part of life. The choice to take a picture of this artist’s figure on the street is simultaneously the choice not to take a picture of the graffiti art on the wall or of the living homeless veteran and his dog down the block. The thoughts about our feed dictate what we choose to capture more than our thoughts about the world in front of us do. Social media forces us not only to look merely for the beautiful and desirable but it also forces us to abandon the ugly and unwanted.