Motor oil, Lard, glue, cigarettes, shellac. What do these items have in common? The disturbing truth is they are commonly used in food ads to create a picture perfect shot for the camera. No wonder why food ads appear one-hundred percent better than reality. How do people not realize they’re being lied to straight to their faces by food ads? The answer is photography. The art of capturing the perfect image has evolved from the unscripted Kodak moment to the fake, scripted Hollywood moments people see on TV every day. People can manipulate pictures at the push of a button in today’s culture so why not alter the way food is photographed too. By analyzing the way food is photographed, one can see the false misconceptions, it creates not only literally
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People crop, edit, brighten or darken their photo’s to obtain a self satisfying portrait of themselves that they feel will be accepted by society. As seen with food, nobody wants to eat the real food because it looks unappetizing; people only desire the fake food which is impossible to obtain. However, people don’t realize this creates walls, which people hide behind because they’re afraid of their true self. By looking at Susan Sontag’s article “On Photography” people can see that making photographs to perfection is insignificant through her statement that “Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire” (34). The fact that anyone can make an image to reflect a piece of reality conveys that society is heading down a path of a false reality. If people spend hours and hours on creating the perfect fake self image they will never achieve their perfect real self …show more content…
Instead of motor oil, lard, glue, cigarettes and shellac people alter personal photographs with a wide variety of filters, special effects and Photoshop techniques. Furthermore, the usage of various filters to create the picture perfect shot of a person directly relates to food companies using food substitutes to create a mouth watering picture. Sadly, the same purpose is behind both previous examples; society has grown to reject the pure raw photograph of an object or person and it only will accept things that are too good to be true. The falsity of photography in society has attributed to a less reliable society than before the time of cameras. Andy Grundberg’s article “Photojournalism: A Blend of Artifice and Actuality” argues the idea that “One would assume that photographs are more reliable representations of historical events than, say, cave drawings or hieroglyphics.” Instead of historical reliable photographs, swap in socially reliable photographs and one can see that through the use of many filters society has become just as reliable as cave drawings when capturing
People crop, edit, brighten or darken their photo’s to obtain a self satisfying portrait of themselves that they feel will be accepted by society. As seen with food, nobody wants to eat the real food because it looks unappetizing; people only desire the fake food which is impossible to obtain. However, people don’t realize this creates walls, which people hide behind because they’re afraid of their true self. By looking at Susan Sontag’s article “On Photography” people can see that making photographs to perfection is insignificant through her statement that “Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire” (34). The fact that anyone can make an image to reflect a piece of reality conveys that society is heading down a path of a false reality. If people spend hours and hours on creating the perfect fake self image they will never achieve their perfect real self …show more content…
Instead of motor oil, lard, glue, cigarettes and shellac people alter personal photographs with a wide variety of filters, special effects and Photoshop techniques. Furthermore, the usage of various filters to create the picture perfect shot of a person directly relates to food companies using food substitutes to create a mouth watering picture. Sadly, the same purpose is behind both previous examples; society has grown to reject the pure raw photograph of an object or person and it only will accept things that are too good to be true. The falsity of photography in society has attributed to a less reliable society than before the time of cameras. Andy Grundberg’s article “Photojournalism: A Blend of Artifice and Actuality” argues the idea that “One would assume that photographs are more reliable representations of historical events than, say, cave drawings or hieroglyphics.” Instead of historical reliable photographs, swap in socially reliable photographs and one can see that through the use of many filters society has become just as reliable as cave drawings when capturing