We were asked to read a chapter discussing rhetoric in photography. Photography has changed the way people view the world. Its changed what people think, what they see, and how they feel. It gives them a picture of what other people have really seen. But even this is another method people use to persuade us. If you were to take the same object, and take pictures of it from different angles, you could end up with a completely different picture that what it originally looked like. By taking a situation, and taking the picture in a certain way, people are able to change what people may believe about that situation, even flip their opinion into a 180 turn from their original stance.
One of the articles in the Chapter was a piece by Lenore Skenazy. In it he discusses Kodak moments. He mentions how they couldn't recall their kids acting like annoying children, and how all their pictures reflected that. People don't want to remember the bad times, or the common moments in life, only the perfect moments, despite these being rare. People always want to take pictures of the perfect times, not our daily lives which seem so common, despite them being the most important times of our life.
A quote from the end of his article strikes me as some great words of wisdom we should always remember:
"When we don't have pictures of the toy-strewn house, mom in her bathrobe, grandpa drinking his soup, the life we really lived disappears. By the time we want to remember it, we can't. We have gained a Kodak moment and lost the story of our lives" (EID, Ch 14, pg 487)
I think we all should strive to remember this in our lives.
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