Visual Culture Today and on September 11th

The idea of visual culture is very interesting to me because we have become such a visual society. We want pictures to accompany everything. Seeing pictures or visual references allow us to be better able to understand things that we have read. I particularly found it interesting that we are inundated with images and that many people enjoy it. People read magazines such as Vogue to look at the images, not just the fashion. We see so many images in our daily lives and someone is always able to take a picture of an event. With the invention of phones with cameras and digital cameras (and now iPods with cameras in them), we are easily able to take a picture of any event in a very quick manner. That is why most events that occur that make national headlines, someone has taken a picture of it or a video somewhere. I feel like most events will be captured no matter what. A good example of this is September 11th. We have read that this is the most photographed event in history. I was truly surprised that so many people had been carrying around cameras and video cameras and easily pulled them out to record the horrific images. This allows us to revisit the event and not just remember seeing it on TV, there are pictures that exist all over that recount the event in all of its horror.

For another one of my classes I read an article about a picture which shows people in Brooklyn who seem to not care too much about the burning World Trade Center in the background. They do look kind of nonchalant, but the photographer and many people looking at it made the wrong assumption about the photo. These people are not without a care, they are deep in thought with each other (some of them are strangers to one another) and they are discussing. I think one of the problems with our overly visual culture is that we sometimes assume to quickly when looking at a photograph. We assume that these people are without a care, but in fact they care a lot (how could you not?!) and they indeed had many important connections to the events that made it hard on them. September 11th was a tragedy for everyone and it is kind of rude that the photographer would imply that these people were relaxing, they were doing anything but that. It just shows that pictures of this event can be misleading, or pictures of any event really, and we have to always take things with a grain of salt (like fashion photos that have been retouched) because we live in this largely visual culture where we are inundated with images.