Week 2; reflection

The start of my course has challenged me in lots of ways, it is constantly evolving or solidifying opinions I have surrounding the medium of photography. An idea that was brought up within the first week of my course was the idea of the "Global image". We explored the idea of an image having a meaning that could have a global impact. At the start of the discussion I had a slight understanding of the idea of global imagery and my stance was that no image could ever have a truly global meaning due to the very nature of human interaction. Through things such as our own prejudices, if they were taught or inherited. The way we look and view information will never have the same definitive meaning to anyone. There were some very interesting points bought up by classmates such as "..it could be argued that this photograph does that by simply portraying one moment in the lives of two humans that are both part of a global existence." this student was exploring the idea of sharing something such as life with people makes an image global. Even though I looked into this idea further, I have to say that for me for an image to have a truly global impact we still need to have a undiluted perspective when viewing the image which just isn't possible.

Something that I found rather interesting was the different view points of everybody, this to me solidified the idea of there not being a global understanding, even though this is taken out of context and used to describe peoples opinions rather than to describe imagery the same premise applies. The way people have so many different ideas when given the same question shows the diversity and subjective nature of us as a species.

At this time of the course I don't feel I have learnt anything directly, but I have learnt that our medium has far more subjective nature than I imagined. Even looking it as someone who has explored the idea of subjectiveness of photography, I have been surprised just how different peoples opinions when viewing imagery is.