Standing Before a Window RR#7 Jeff Richmond

Susan Sontag in her paper “In Plato’s Cave” brings my attention to task on my interaction with still media, photography. I appreciate photographs, but I'm not sure if I have ever thought about how they influence my life, or how they express meaning. I’ll admit I had not given much thought to the influence of photos in my life as I have always seen more influence from video.
Sontag brings up the idea that the photo is a new medium of seeing the world. Almost to say that it is a new bit of software for our minds to understand our experiences. “In Plato's Cave” Sontag starts by inferring that we started to learn from the images photos gave us access to. It seemed not to be the images themselves, but the ideas framed in them that gave strength to the influences they had on our mind, and I'm sure our culture as well. Sontag's statement “This very instability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world” is a reference to how much of the world is photographed. Not though, how much is photographed, but how much those photos have changed how we see the photos we take.
Our scope of reality changes by the ideas captured by the eye of the camera. I often think about the influence that video has but seeing still images reminded me that there are forces that seem almost more primal in experience. The still photo reminds me that video came from somewhere, photography, and that seeming simpler objects can give a coarser and seeming more real experience.
There are places on this planet that are almost covered with pictures. We have a varying understanding of these still pictures, and those pictures influence our relation to other pictures yet. Is there a feedback loop here, a prophecy playing out in a memetic landscape? One can only notice how these images influence the way we see the world and threw that influence we must take into account the fact that our way of seeing things change, dramatically, over time. Still photographs are a window into the past, but I seen now how they might also be a window into the future as well.