Marvin Heiferman’s essay, Photography changes Everything

    Reading through Heiferman's essay gave me a lot of perspective that I didn't expect to receive about photography. I thought photography was as simple as being able to and knowledgeable in taking photos. Those that know how to take a good photo understand lighting and angles as well as what settings to use in order to get clear images that can be blown up as large as necessary in order to fix the tiniest details. I figured photography and photographers just know how to take good photos people can look back upon and enjoy the memory that was created that day. Photography is so commonplace that I figure if anyone puts in the effort it can be done. 

    After reading the essay what I learned is that photography has multiple meanings and uses for everyone. I never really thought about how it differs through different professions whether it's for a doctor, a physicist, or even an astronomer. Photographs I have always considered to be a moment that captures memories typically relating to people hanging out and doing whatever they can with others or alone at times. When I think of an X-ray I don't think about the fact that technically it's a photo of my bone, I just consider it to be a medical device that allows us access to witness what has internally happened to a bone. The fact also remains a photograph can ruin lives, the article references Anthony Weiner and some Twitter incident but I think what is more relatable to my generation is people deciding to take intimate photos meant for their partner meanwhile the photos either end up being shared. Some people end up heavily embarrassed knowing that their intimate photo more than likely has been circulated to all the people they know and now have to live with the fact that to them it seems their whole world now has access to an image of them nude. Photos can be useful but they are also problematic.

    Reading through the article the first time I think I somehow got the sense that some people believe photography to be somewhat of a dead topic due to its accessibility. In today's day and age, the world is heavily monitored either by handheld cameras, drones, traffic cameras, or just the news. Plenty of people have the ability to create media that of course if the entire world is deciding to take photographs of anything and everything then it will all feel redundant and likely next to impossible to find and encounter a scenario in which a photo can be 100% unique and never before able to be witnessed. 

    The article states that 1.3 billion photos are created daily and that people take more photos because they can. To even begin to try to imagine what 1 billion photos seems unlikely, starting small at a thousand seems more plausible but it would take a million sets of a thousand to get to a billion. Hearing numbers and facts like this makes no sense to me in my head, its like if you were to say printing a billion notecard-sized photos can wrap the Earth 100 times over, the statistic seems so absurd and drastic that processing what that would even look like just won't ever make sense. For the world to be able to create so much is insane, I imagine after a year you could more than likely have an entire timelapse of an area based solely on the photos that strangers have taken in that time. Photography is something I see as beautiful, I think there are definitely some photos that can paint or be worth a thousand words but those are rarities we have to appreciate as they allow us some insight into a fraction of what the time was like then. Being able to see things like families in the Great Depression, civil rights protestors, video of Martin Luther King Jr and his infamous speech, or even more recent events such as mass shootings in America or protestors rallying for their causes. Not all photos are the same but there are definitely different purposes and perspectives into what someone can get from a photo and why it was even taken in the first place.