Photography Discussion

Both articles discuss a photos ability to preserve a moment or person in time and space. Bazin talks about photography as a continuation of our psychological desire to preserve our legacy once we are gone, or having "the last word in the argument with death". A photograph, like a mummy, gives humans a reassurance of immortality. However, Kracauer on the other hand describes photographs as having an opposite effect. Once a photograph becomes old, it enables the modern viewer to compare the present and past states, and in a sense solidifies that moment as a foreign time, where the photo exists only as a memento of history. How do photographs serve the past? Do they embalm or bury the times and places that they represent?

With the many technological advances in photography today, and the new abilities to manipulate photos with computers , how has photography as an art changed? Does photography still have the reliable objectivity that Bazin describes in his article? Or has photography become more like painting in its distorted representation of the world? Photography, like painting is a genre that has evolved in form and function. We now have other sources of realistic representation such as television or computers (GoogleEarth) , and no longer rely on photos to give us that real life "mirror image".