David Burnham In Devil In The White City

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Photography is the art of observation. It is the only language understood in any country around the world. Photography is essential to the understanding of social, political, and economical issues. The key is in the eye of the beholder as Tom Pion claims, it is not what you see in the photo it is what you think, what you know. To understand and acknowledge a photo, a photo that expands our knowledge to global, or national issues rising rapidly. To the misrepresentation and underlying set up of a photo to limit and trick our perception, our understanding. It is the outreach of global comparison to history and life, future and present. It is the photo that holds the key to all knowledge understood and misrepresented. It is 1912. The streets…show more content…
Its reflection of his authoritarian character is represented in the strict rules against picking flowers, and his image of perfection is shown in “Big Mary” The Statue of the Republic. It is all a dream come true, a vision that no one is allowed to keep, or take, except for Burnham. However, Burnham still wants to share his city so he grants Charles Dudley Arnold the position of the official fair photographer. Burnham wants depicted only his reflection: a neat, well-dressed, seemingly composed, upper-class people. As Susan Sontag states, “Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies.” With Burnham’s obsessive control over detail and every event, every attending visitor expects an image of neatly composed people walking the fair. Some photos lead to misrepresentation. In reality, the fair was buzzing, lively, wild, chaotic, a picturesque scene of exotic colors and smells. With lost children running, burning buildings falling, and theft always around the corner; the fair was not always as eloquent as Burnham had pictured. This photographic limit led many visitors astray and in for a wild…show more content…
Photography also offers many angles of available knowledge. If it wasn’t for Louis Daguerre, mastermind of the camera, all photographic history dating back to 1837 wouldn’t be available. A great benefit of recording and studying history is the ability to connect back 100 year old ideas, practices, and issues. Without the photograph, a moment frozen in time, something words can’t describe, a piece of evidence captured forever, wouldn’t be available. Wars, battles, fights, couldn’t have been described as gruesomely as they were without photos. However, not all of history is gruesome and it is Michael Huges life goal to represent all of history’s softer, more picturesque qualities. The young, notable photographer searches for old photographs and tracks them back to the spot of capture. Here he created a new style of photography, old and new. Pictures of young boys in front of factories captured a century later brought back to life. It is long gone congressman in front the Capital restored back to times of negotiation and conflict. It is Huges who has helped people, families, cities, and countries connect back to times of beauty, hardship, and perfect

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