Week 13

Ask anyone and they will say that a photo is capturing the moment, true to what is going on in the environment. Ask a photographer and they will tell you that photography is fiction. Photography in todays time and way back when it was film has always been fiction if that is what the artist chooses. The act of taking the photo is only half of the process. Back when it was film you could create different chemical reactions to develop all kinds of effects. Today we can do the same but with digital apps like photoshop and lightroom.  Photographers are look to create a story and if there are elements in a photo that conflict with the story then it is removed. Photography is the act of capturing the moment but also creating one. The artist can either create the moment by altering the moment of altering the photos. Countries have gone to war over photos but the likelihood of them double checking them is very unlikely due to people being ignorance about the art of photography.  We believe that photos are true because of how the typical process is explained to us, but photography is a whole lot more then that. It is however important to have photos that are true that tell the story as it happened. Like film we have documentaries and we have narrative films, the same concepts are true to photography we have photography that is fiction and we have photo journalism that needs to stay true in order to keep the history of some cultures alive.  Some cultures need it to show what happened and what thing need to stay true and historic. 

This photo is seen as one of the first photographs it is of the empty streets of paris. But the streets were never empty you just don't see the people because it was a long exposure shot. https://benbeck.co.uk/firsts/2_The_Human_Subject/photo1h.htm

Week 12

This week we dove into the aspects of gender rolls and various forms and place where and how a gender roll can be "preformed" at, by reading  Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,”  This reading really made you think more about societal rolls of gender and were that typically is or is not appropriate.  Gender, while I do think it is changing, seems to still follow a very old almost biblical side of how you should dress and act. Men don't wear dresses, woman do not do much asides from bar children and cook. While this is changing and females are increasingly becoming more and more integrated into our corporate world and and in more recent events into our government. There is still the lingering of stereotypes for our genders. Being raised in a small farming town it was standard that woman not wear short things, boys not have long hair, girls like boys and boys like girls. That's the way it is.  Anyone to go outside of those standards was in a was punished socially. No one would hang out or associate with them. No one was really allowed to explore their or the next gender because you got the one you got at birth that was it. If you were to explore anything you were doing it hush hush and out of the eyes of society. Roles are even still present where women are oppressed in my home town to date, no government leaders are women, but nearly all the teachers are. No women speak or give group prayer at my church just repopulate it. All the woman in that town act femininity they submit to the roles laid down by society before them slowly but surely continuing their own self-oppression.  

The image I choose for this week is the "We can do It" poster and it for its time really represented the opposite of gender norms for women.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Can_Do_It!

Week 11

    This week we got the chance to read Margaret Kovach chapters of "Epistemology and research: Centring Tribal Knowledge." As this weeks reading were fairly complex to comprehend they were different from the topics that we have been discussing. This is our first week talking about the theory of knowing something from culture to culture. I find this topic very interesting as I have traveled a bit. In talking about the language we speak vs how another I think there are a lot of things we have to contribute to when discussing topics across cultures and mainly languages. In taking research from one language to another or talking about another language without being fully versed in the entire language you are almost playing a card game with out a full deck in a way. You do not have all the pieces to the puzzle when you dive into research of a language that you are not 100% in. While there are some things that you can learn that will help you in understanding the language there are also things that you only really know by being fluent or having the language be your native language.  Within some cultures and language there are words that do not even directly translate to another word but more to an idea or a concept of living or thought. With out fully understanding the language you can not fully understand the depth of some of those words or phrases that simply do not directly aline.  I think only knowing one or two language really narrows your world view because yes while you can be an expert in what you speak or know, you still do not connect to the rest of the world that reads or understand within there language. I think you have to know one language, typically being your native language. But as soon as you learn another language then you open your brain and mental ability to understand things that otherwise would not make sense. You see things with a more open perspective because you have to learn something completely different. Learning more language does make you more worldly. Not only by being able to communicate with so many others but by being able to have an open mind set to things that are different.   

For this weeks image I picked Raphael Sanzio painting "School Of Athens" Within it there are some many individuals with various view and theories coming from different language and background. 

http://www.abc-people.com/data/rafael-santi/school_of_athens.htm