Picture Time!

Picture Time!

            Time to pull out the cameras, it’s Thanksgiving! Holidays are times where friends and family gather together to smile and hug. At the majority of these functions there is an appointed amateur photographer who snaps consecutive photographs. The reading, Inside the Great Machine of Desire, states that “...photographers may frame an event in order to present it as a random moment”. This framing of images makes it difficult for someone looking at a photograph to determine if the emotions depicted in the image are real or fake.

Cannibal Tours and National Geographic are similar to society’s tabloid shots and family photographs because they display people’s need to document life through images instead of relying on the power of memory. People believe they need photographs because human memory is susceptible to forget, but memory holds onto the most important experiences in a person’s life and lets the less important moments fade away.

Cannibal Tours’ tourist captures photograph

Paparazzi taking photographs of actress, Claire Danes.

        

            There is such a need in modern society to document happiness. Cannibal Tours reveals an in-depth look at society because at one time or another everyone is guilty of acting like a tourist. In fact, people do not even have to go to another country to act like tourists. Tabloid magazines and entertainment shows, similar to People Magazine and TMZ, take photographs of celebrities for people’s enjoyment. Many paparazzi force celebrities to put on a happy face in front of the camera. When listening to Flo Rida’s new song, The Club Can’t Even Handle Me Right Now, the lyrics “paparazzi trying to make me pose” remind me of the part in Cannibal Tours, where a tourist lady tries to make two boys smile for a photograph. In both cases, the individual taking the picture does not care if it is a real happiness or a fake happiness. The capturing of the image is only for commercial gain; celebrities acquire exposure through images and the Papa New Guinea boys earn money for pictures of them. When a photographer asks someone to pose for a picture, two questions should be raised: “What is the purpose of the photograph? and “Who will benefit from it?”

            Similar to how tourists in Cannibal Tours cannibalistically snap photographs, paparazzi also repeatedly capture photographs at movie premieres and award shows. Tourists believe that if they see a famous celebrity or a native person, it will make them a cultured individual. These same tourists are just invading the lives of people whom they do not know and capturing non-essential memories. Ultimately a photograph, whether it is in National Geographic, People Magazine, or a family album, can never accurately display reality. Only the people featured in a photograph know if the expressions shown are authentic or posed.

   

I look happy in both photographs, but in reality I was only truly happy in one.

Is it possible to tell which one?---GUESS!