Photography

In Andre Bazin’s article “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” Bazin begins by mentioning Egyptians and “the practice of embalming the dead … to be a fundamental factor in their creation”. With this in mind, how does the idea of Egyptians preserving their bodies after death relate to photography as “plastic art”? How are they both participating in creation?

Egyptians embalmed bodies to preserve the dead, by doing so they created and captured a moment of time. For Egyptians the body captured the moment and for photography the embalmed time with a flash. Now our art of preservation is in photographs, portraits. This was something that I would have never thought to relate but does seem very accurate.



In his article “Photography”, Siegfried Kracauer states that, “Photography is bound to time in precisely the same way as fashion.” (55). Is this an accurate statement is photography only relevant within its time period? Will it be forgotten like fashion and looked back as an old form? Has this already happened with the advance of new digital media?

I think that photography does capture the moment of the time and leave a lasting memory, but Kracauer states that “The photograph becomes a ghost…” (56). This is because that memory or story is forgotten when people are no longer there to explain the moment. I thought that photography was new form of preserving but Kracauer made me doubt whether this will be true. When I’m gone will my photographs be important to anyone else? I think that it is difficult to say that photography is gone because it is still around us, but I do think that with new digital media that it has changed and perhaps evolved in people’s eyes.