Resources on the extremely powerful emotional pull of photographs?
September 16, 2018 5:09 AM   Subscribe

When people are asked the one thing they would save in a house fire, it’s usually photographs.

Even the most stoic people I know are touched by photographs. Even in this era of social media and always-on technology, photographs (whether printed or in digital format) still have the power to captivate people like no other medium. I would love to investigate this further, can anybody recommend some books, websites which discuss this in more detail?
posted by jacobean to Media & Arts (9 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
I’m pretty sure the issue is the images, not the medium they are printed in. If I had digital copies of all the photos of my mom, for example, I wouldn’t feel such a pressing need to save the physical copies.
posted by lydhre at 5:18 AM on September 16, 2018


Which suggests that this is going to change eventually, as most photos end up having a digital origin.
posted by lydhre at 5:20 AM on September 16, 2018


It’s old, but Camera Lucida, maybe.
posted by juv3nal at 5:51 AM on September 16, 2018 [7 favorites]


Oh hey, if anyone’s interested, you’re in luck, archive.org has the pdf.
posted by juv3nal at 5:59 AM on September 16, 2018 [2 favorites]


There was a survey done on this, https://www.moneyadviceservice.org.uk/blog/what-would-you-save-in-a-fire - top result is wallets, then photos. I think increasingly it will become phones instead as photos live forever in the cloud.
posted by JonB at 7:13 AM on September 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


Susan Sontag “On Photography” addresses exactly what you are talking about.
posted by johngumbo at 11:20 AM on September 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


I was also going to recommend "On Photography," although Sontag takes a fairly dim view of photography and the motivations for it.
posted by Beardman at 12:09 PM on September 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


There's a Mad Men episode about naming the Kodak Carousel that has a lot of good thoughts about the emotional nature of photographs. I remember something about photographs being like a time machine, rocking one back and forth ... like a baby in a carousel? I don't remember it fully, but it was powerful.
posted by xammerboy at 10:38 PM on September 16, 2018 [1 favorite]


Take a look at Geoffrey Batchen's theory of vernacular photography. "Vernacular" describes photographs and photographic works which are "amateur" and banal, the everyday snaps we all take that will never make it to an art gallery or exhibition. Often these objects are imbued with huge personal meaning, and invite the viewer to engage with them imaginatively and/or physically.

Source:
Batchen, Geoffrey. (2000). Vernacular Photographies. History of Photography, 24(3), 262-271. Online here (requires subscription). Or available as a .pdf (from republication as a book chapter elsewhere) via a course syllabus here.
posted by thetarium at 2:19 AM on September 18, 2018


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