Sunday, September 16, 2012

(nostalgia) <--> Sontag

...Which photographs in (nostalgia) most strongly attest to the surrealist tendency of photography, and why? In what way is the film possibly surrealistic itself?

Sontag describes the innate surrealism of photography stemming from its representation of an image from the past that is now dead. A photograph does not capture a moment as much as it captures the nostalgia of the photographer, and reflects that emotion back at him/her. It is a version of something that probably was once there, in a strange almost ghostlike form. The image is now an echo of words untold. What is really attached to a photograph is sentimentality, and all of the pictures shown in (nostalgia) mean something to Frampton, with perhaps the exception of the one picture he did not take himself. Each image is just a surface look at events in his life; a window into his experiences. One of my favorites was the moldy spaghetti, photographed in a way that looks abstract in the absence of context.

The black and white filter on the film hinders the audience even more in projecting their own story onto each photo because it is difficult to distinguish details. The viewer is lead to be constantly trying to sync up the descriptions of the photos with their respective images. The context of this story stuck out to me just because it was different from most of the other ones in a whimsical way. The tone of the person speaking does not suggest that it's supposed to be a statement art piece, but is just a photo of some spaghetti and sauce left out that Frampton took a picture of every day for two months because of a friend. I wondered why he chose the 18th day, and why his friend wanted these pictures in the first place, but realized that any justification I decided on was just my own experiences being stirred into the image. The thought put in by viewers about the meaning of all these images that cannot really mean anything to us is kind of surreal in itself.

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