“American Photography”

               

PBS’ “American Photography” was a great overview of photography over the years. The beginning of this documentary explains the importance of photography and how different our world would be without it. This documentary does an incredible job at showing us the history of photography. Not only did it point out important facts about historic events in photography, but it also pointed out bad and good events as well. It’s crazy to think about all the very important and unbelievable historic events captured on in photographs. The first camera ever invented was called “the brownie” and the price was only a dollar! Can you believe that, a dollar? Nowadays, cameras are usually $10 and up. The brownie began a whole new era in the world. The second awesome event I found very interesting is the second biggest discovery in photography: postcards. Postcards are now known to be for the most part vintage and many people who travel plenty use them and send them. The documentary followed up with the different types of photography being discovered, like abstract form, photographs on printed advertisements instead of drawings, and photographs of celebrities and even the civil war being photographed. We have stories from the past because of photography. We learned about different cultures and parts of the world we didn’t know about until photography came in place. “One of the things that happens throughout this century is that people are beginning to depend more and more on visual sources. I don’t know many people thought about it a lot but photographs are becoming more and more into their lives. So it became a language that everyone knew they could speak.” This quote from this documentary really caught my attention. I believe this quotes makes sense, even for the century we are in now, the 20th century. We rely on social media, visuals and photographs for information about pretty much anything and everything. Whether we’re searching for politics, religion, celebrities, sports, news, we look for visuals that tell a story. Something that will show us exactly what happened and what is going on. It’s amazing to know we have pictures of what was going on during the 1900s. Pictures showed on this documentary made me feel incredible delighted because I had never seen pictures of what was going on during the world wars, the first official picture of earth, or even an actual picture of Einstein. After watching this documentary, I realized there is more to photography than just simply taking random pictures of things, photographs leave behind a great story for our future generations, stories only our minds can remember, but can also now be seen for a lifetime.