A Twilight ArtRachel Diamond

Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects

photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.

An ugly or grotesque subject may be moving because it has

been dignified by the attention of the photographer.

The camera makes reality atomic, manageable, and opaque. It is a view of the

world which denies interconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each

moment the character of a mystery.

Photography are miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.

Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all objects that make up, and

thicken, as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the

camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

Although photography generates works that can be called art – it requires

subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure -- photography is not, to begin

with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art

(among other things) are made.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality,

and eventually in one's own.

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), and

interpretation of the real, it is also a trace, something directly stenciled

off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are

a neat slice of time, not a flow. Each still photograph is a privileged moment

turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.

When ordinary seeing was further violated—and the object

isolated from its surroundings rendering it abstract—new conventions

about what was beautiful took hold.

The news that the camera could lie made getting

photographed much more popular.

Insofar as photography does peel away the dry wrappers of habitual seeing, it

creates another habit of seeing: both intense and cool, solicitous and

detached; charmed by the significant detail, addicted to incongruity.

A photograph is not an opinion. Or is it?

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to

participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability,

mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs

testify to time's relentless melt.

Aesthetics: Philosophy of Art—Final Project Process Paper

The summer before my freshman year of high school, I had to choose an elective class to fulfill an art credit. I chose photographybecause it fit well with my schedule and was something new and different. It only took a few weeks before I became completelyenraptured with photography and the darkroom became my second home. Although the curriculum only required one year of artclasses, I continued with photography through senior year and was one of four students who participated in the school’s first APPhotography program. Photography was a huge a part of my life, both in school and recreationally; my camera was an extensionof myself.

When I came to Duke University, I naturally wanted to take my love of photography even further and I initially planned to enroll inthe photography minor. As a prerequisite for the program, I first took the Introduction to Photography course, which I foundenjoyable, but not at all challenging. After that I took Alternative Photographic processes where I was able to experiment withnew and old technologies and relished in discovering innovative ways to extend my skill set.

Over time, my broader interest in the arts led me to expand my curricular choice from a Photography minor to a Visual Studiesminor and eventually to the Program II plan I intend to apply for in the spring. In the past few years I have nourished a passion fortechnology that mirrors my passion for art, and my creative energies have become focused on marrying the two spheres. As a nodto this emerging path of concentration, my parents bought me a digital SLR camera last winter, a Nikon D3000.

As much as I loved my new toy, it took longer than I expected for it to feel like a part of me. I still sometimes struggle to feel asconnected to my digital camera as I did with my manual camera, although it is often difficult to choose to shoot with my manualcamera in certain situations when the digital is much more easy, quick, and reliable and I know I can always manipulate thephotos later. The technology affords me infinite artistic and documentary possibilities, but in doing so allows me a high degree oflaziness. In truth, I worry that this gift was actually a curse; something I would never tell my parents.

Reading Susan Sontag’s essays in “On Photography,” I kept oscillating between feelings of agreement and indignation. I foundmany of her points interesting and thought-provoking, but was put off by her matter-of-fact tone and sweeping generalizations.Nevertheless, her essays made me nostalgic for my old camera and like she said, “when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.” Forthis project, I chose to use my new technologies to pay homage to an older technology and employ the medium of photographyto create art. The process was emotional and connecting for me and helped bring me back to a time where I felt more presentand creative.