For many of us, although taking photos, sharing and browsing photos has become a habit in everyday life, our frequent contact with images does not foster our literacy in visual expression. The ways in which photography is used in history include: as a means of artistic expression, as a tool for science and exploration, as a medium for documentary literature, as a means of telling stories and recording history, and as an exchange in increasingly visual culture. The mode of criticism. People take pictures of a variety of reasons. It can be said that photography has long changed the way people see the world. No one can see every corner of the world in his lifetime, but photography provides a broader way to see the world.
When I talked to some of my friends about some of the pictures on INS that remind me of celebrities or stories from art history, many people said they were not interested in history. As an art student, this made me feel frustrated. Is it true that photography history is not being talked about today? Marvin Heiferman pointed out that talking about the history of photography is not something that can be done in the twentieth century. The history of photography is not a universal language. Understanding the principles and production of images is a process of cultivating visual aesthetic literacy.
Maybe fine art is not something everyone will appreciate. But fine art is quietly changing the world. If I may quote Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada,
“Do you think this has nothing to do with you?
You go to your closet, and you select, I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously, to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue.
It’s not turquoise. It’s actually cerulean. And you’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers And then it, Uh, filtered down through the department stores, and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner, where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs And it’s sort of comical How you think that you’ve made a choice, when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room, from a pile of stuff.”
Perhaps in the eyes of many people (including my parents), art is hard to make money and is separated from real life. However, art has quietly changed the world. Photography as a practical tool, a philosophical and emotional expression, together with other art forms, has created the world around us.