John Berger Ways of Seeing
“Publicity is not merely an assembly of competing messages : it is a language in itself, which is always being used to make the same general proposal. Within publicity, choices are offered between this cream and that cream, that car and this car, but publicity as a system only makes a single proposal.
It proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more.”
“Clothes, food, cars, cosmetics, baths, sunshine are real things to be enjoyed in themselves. Publicity begins by working on a natural appetite for pleasure.”
Essentially, this is saying that commercialism boils down to capitalistic propaganda, and I feel like this has really only become more true in the modern day. If you go on your phone, you cannot go two minutes without seeing an ad pop up on your feed, whether it's Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, etc., it really feels like all these sites nowadays are sorta shoving these ads down your throat nonstop. And the bit where the author writes about how they appear to be competing messages over products, you have instances where you look at the Wendy's Twitter account, and have these big brands trying to act funny and relatable and start fake arguments with other chains on Twitter all to try and become viral and convince you to buy their product.
Susan Sontag On Photography
“To collect photographs is to collect the world.”
“Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.”
The first quote reminded me of that one quote where one image contains a thousand words, and I thought it was very cute and fitting. The second quote reminds me much how everything we do and create has a motive, intent, and bias, whether good or not, and I thought it was very well worded.
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