What Photography Means to me

There are so many different ways that photography is used in our day to day lives. Social media platforms like Instagram consist of millions of pictures uploaded by users all over the world with the goal of sharing with friends and sometimes strangers. Photography has so many different meaning but to me photography has always been a way of documenting moments. Like Marvin Heiferman mentioned, photographs do things to us " they engage us optically, neurologically, intellectually, emotionally, viscerally, physically". There are photographs that have lingering feelings that you will carry with you. 

In a world where photography is accessible to everyone not all photographs evoke the same type of emotions. We can see the image that Marvin used in his book to show the mass number of images all in one space, but what makes that photograph art compared to others? Spending so much time looking at images from textbooks, galleries, museums and social media you have to ask yourself, what does this image make me feel? If we were just consuming images without any true meaning or purpose, then there will be no photography websites or gallery shows focusing on this medium. As Marvin also mentioned there is no one criteria for what makes a photograph art besides what it makes you feel and how you interpret it. 

Photography serves many purposes in our day-to-day life; we've seen them for years be use for journalism purposes whether it is in a newspaper or on a post promoting the news article. This way of using photography is important because like Marvin mentioned while our ability to recall moments in the past can change or be forgotten a photograph allows that moment to be still in time.

 It is important to also highlight how the way we value photography has changed. Photography is s accessible to us that it can be seen as disposable and replaceable. Once an image serves its purpose its easy to forget about them and move on to the next one. However, there are images that hold so many emotions and meanings that they stick with you and those are the photographs that will never be forgotten in this face pace age of photography.