(abandoned substack post)

feel like the title of this post should be a quote about polaroid

I’ve always wanted to research and write a sprawling post about cameras, images, and I’ve always thought I would spend years and years on it. Why? well… I’ve always been interested in perception, how we perceive, how I am perceived. Could do a whole separate post about that, maybe try to weave some of that into here. Definitely doing a whole separate post about ads for sure.

I want to read a truly magnificent essay about how the proliferation of cameras in everybody’s hands + digital means to share them, has reshaped our self-image, our social landscape, and even our material reality

Has anyone written this? Or do I have to do it? 😂

— Visakan Veerasamy (@visakanv) March 18, 2020

tinseltown, picture palaces, cinemas

john bergers ways of seeing

There’s a 1972 documentary (available on youtube!)–  and a book

Camera changed what we see. Even changes paintings from before cameras

Reproducibility. Context

“Everything around the image is a part of its meaning” – confirms and consolidates

Images travel, meanings travel. Transmittable. Market value – a Leonardo sketch becomes like a relic in a shrine.

False mystery and false religiosity –

–

The nudes of European painting

To be naked vs to be nude- to be seen by others 

Nakedness Is a sight for those who are dressed

Nakedness is created in The Eye of the beholder

Shame in relation to the spectator

Beauty contest

Photographs as advertisement for myself 

polaroid camera:

one of the ways you can think of the iPhone is as a fusion of the Sony Walkman (another product Steve Jobs admired) and the Polaroid camera. You can see the similarity in the ads, the focus on the simplicity and intuitiveness of the interface pic.twitter.com/RigwqKbVDD

— Visakan Veerasamy (@visakanv) October 30, 2019

The media environment I was born into

my relationship with cameras – I remember my family developing rolls of film, having photo albums, baby pictures

I remember the first few phones – we called them handphones in Singapore, I suppose you might call them cell phones – and the grainy pictures you could take with them

early days of facebook where people would upload dozens of chaotic photos of parties and so on

GTA

When I saw this GTA V poster in real life, it blew my mind. This was in 2013 – selfies, Instagram, etc were just beginning to take off, and they hadn't quite become as "normal" as they are now. I think I wrote a lengthy note about this. sth abt next-level self-awareness/gaze pic.twitter.com/DUO6WGTr86

— Visakan Veerasamy (@visakanv) February 6, 2018

Anyone with a smartphone can vlog

// abandoned