Photo 2 at SMU Spring 2020

Bishop talks about our complicated relationship with the new digital technology in the current state as a “troubling oscillation between intimacy and distance” as well as “propos[ing] an incommensurability between our doggedly physiological lives and the screens to which we are glued.” In my opinion, these sentiments can be refuted more than she seems to admit as she doesn’t support this with any other points. There seems to be a more conscious level of oversharing in certain aspects of social media that close the gap from intimacy and distance, leaving people that a person could not have met in their day-to-day lives to see personal and intimate blurbs sent into the ether. She also makes it seem like people cannot relate their lives to a screen where there is an abundance of information, data, etc. where one could find relatable topics, people, ideas, and more that can fit into or apply to our own personal experiences. Bishop also seems to have a cynical idea of how the ...

One of the ideas in the article I resonated with was Claire's point that "today, film's soft warmth feels intimate compared with the cold, hard digital image" -- I hadn't explored film photography until I took Jonathan's darkroom class last year, and for me, it was almost like re-discovering photography. It felt familiar, yet very different than anything I had done before. Almost nostalgic, yet that was the first time I was experiencing it. For me, the fascination with the analog is very real -- and even my 'digital' work has become inspired by it in various ways. I can see how Claire's point that truly, pure digital art (at least at the time of writing her article) was very hard to come by as lots of artists' work is rooted in some 'physical' form, whether that be the form it's displayed in or the methods the artist used to create their work.

Hello photographers, and welcome to the course blog for the Spring 2020 semester of Photo 2 at SMU. This will be where your responses to theoretical readings should be posted. All theoretical readings will be available on the Canvas page for this course as pdf files. Please post a substantive response to the readings. I am not interested in a summary or book report. Just tell me what it made you think about, how you felt, whether you agreed or disagreed. Also feel free to post pictures, videos, links, memes, articles on piracy, entrances to the deep web, and all the deep dark secrets of the universe as represented on the internets. Have fun, make art, be weird.