“
He'd never need a camera to remember this, and damn if he ever wanted anyone but him to see her like she was at this moment.
”
”
Kelly Moran (Exposure)
“
Finnik?” I say. “Maybe some pants?”
He looks down at his legs as if noticing them for the first time. Then he whips of his hospital gown, leaving him in just is underwear. “Why? Do you find this”-he strikes a ridiculously proactive pose-“distracting?”
I can’t help laughing because it’s funny, and it’s extra funny because Boggs looks so uncomfortable, and I’m happy because Finnik actually sounds like the guy I met at the Quarter Quell.
“I’m only human, Odair.” I get in before the elevator doors close. “Sorry,” I say to Boggs.
“Don’t be. I thought you… handled that well,” He says. “Better than my having to arrest him, anyway.”
Fulvia Cardew hustles over an makes a sound of frustration when she sees my clean face. “All that hard work, down the drain. I’m not blaming you, Katniss. It’s just that very few people are born with camera-ready faces. Like him.” She snags Gale, who’s in a conversation with Plutarch, and spins him towards us. “Isn’t he handsome?”
Gale does look stricking in the uniform, I guess. But the question just embarrasses us both Given our history. I’m trying to think of a witty comeback when Boggs says brusquely, “Well don’t expect us to be too impressed. We just saw Finnick Odair in his underwear.
”
”
Suzanne Collins (Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, #3))
“
When you see such photos, you can't help but wonder at just how sweet and sad and innocent all moments of life are rendered by the tripping of a camera's shutter, for at that point the future is still unknown and has yet to hurt us, and also for that brief moment, our poses are accepted as honest.
”
”
Douglas Coupland
“
You go through life thinking there's so much you need. Your favorite jeans and sweater. The jacket with the faux-fur lining to keep you warm. Your phone and your music and your favorite books. Mascara. Irish breakfast tea and cappuccinos from Trouble Coffee. You need your yearbooks, every stiffly posed school-dance photo, the notes your friends slipped into your locker. You need the camera you got for your sixteenth birthday and the flowers you dried. You need your notebooks full of the things you learned and don't want to forget. You need your bedspread, white with black diamonds. You need your pillow - it fits the way you sleep. You need magazines promising self-improvement. You need your running shoes and your sandals and your boots. Your grade report from the semester you got straight As. Your prom dress, your shiny earrings, your pendants on delicate chains. You need your underwear, your light-colored bras and your black ones. The dream catcher hanging above your bed. The dozens and dozens of shells in glass jars... You think you need all of it. Until you leave with only your phone, your wallet, and a picture of your mother.
”
”
Nina LaCour (We Are Okay)
“
As Susan Sontag observes in her study of photography, “Reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by cameras.” Bourgeois families in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Sontag points out, posed for portraits in order to proclaim the family’s status, whereas today the family album of photographs verifies the individual’s existence: the camera helps to weaken the older idea of development as moral education and to promote a more passive idea according to which development consists of passing through the stages of life at the right time and in the right order.
”
”
Christopher Lasch (The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations)
“
Every time Sachs posed for a picture, he was forced to impersonate himself, to play the game of pretending to be who he was. After a while, it must have had an effect on him. (…) They say that a camera can rob a person of his soul. In this case, I believe it was just the opposite. With this camera, I believe that Sachs’s soul was gradually given back to him.
”
”
Paul Auster (Leviathan)
“
I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice (apology of this mortiferous power: certain Communards paid with their lives for their willingness or even their eagerness to pose on the barricades: defeated, they were recognized by Thiers's police and shot, almost every one).
”
”
Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography)
“
On clubbers: They were all photographing themselves. In fact, that's all they seemed to be doing. Standing around in expensive clothes, snapping away with phones and cameras. One pose after another, as though they needed to prove their own existence, right there, in the moment. Crucially, this seemed to be the reason they were there in the first place. There was very little dancing. Just pouting and flashbulbs.
”
”
Charlie Brooker
“
You might not see it now, but you are stronger than you can ever imagine.
You cannot become comfortable in your pain. You have to let the pain that you feel turn you into a rose without thorns. There are sixteen pieces on the chess board. The king is the most important piece, but the difference is that the queen is the most powerful piece!
You are a queen, you can maneuver around your opponents; they do not have the power over your life, your mind or soul. You might think you’ve been a prisoner, but that is your past’ Look in the now and work your way to how you want your future to be. Exercise your thoughts into a pattern of letting go, and think positively about more of what you want than what you do not want.
Queen!
You are a queen! As a matter of fact, you are the queen! Act as if you know it!
You are powerful, determined, strong, and you can make the biggest and most extravagant move and put it into action.
Lights, camera, strike a pose and own it!
It is yours to own!
”
”
Charlena E. Jackson (A Woman's Love Is Never Good Enough)
“
We can never make proper goodbyes. It was your last ride in a Checker cab and you had no warning. It was the last time you were going to have Lake Tung Ting shrimp in that kinda shady Chinese restaurant and you had no idea. If you had known, perhaps you would have stepped behind the counter and shaken everyone's hand, pulled out the disposable camera and issued posing instructions. But you had no idea. There are unheralded tipping points, a certain number of times that we will unlock the front door of an apartment. At some point you were closer to the last time than you were to the first time, and you didn't even know it. You didn't know that each time you passed the threshold you were saying goodbye.
”
”
Colson Whitehead (The Colossus of New York)
“
On the day all these photos were taken, none of the men, children, women who posed innocently in front of the camera could have thought that that moment would represent them for all eternity.
”
”
Valérie Perrin (Fresh Water for Flowers)
“
When he says "Skins or blankets?" it will take you a moment to realized that he's asking which you want to sleep under. And in your hesitation he'll decide that he wants to see your skin wrapped in the big black moose hide. He carried it, he'll say, soaking wet and heavier than a dead man, across the tundra for two—was it hours or days or weeks? But the payoff, now, will be to see it fall across one of your white breasts. It's December, and your skin is never really warm, so you will pull the bulk of it around you and pose for him, pose for his camera, without having to narrate this moose's death.
”
”
Pam Houston (Cowboys Are My Weakness)
“
De ijskoningin van de pose liet zich het liefst van al portretteren in een decor van bloemen of struiken. Ze had ook de eigenaardige tic deze bloemen of struiken te moeten aanraken voor de camera. Heel lullige foto’s levert dat op, een vrouw die stokstijf met een bevroren tandpastareclameglimlach de lens aangaapt en onderwijl in een mimosa knijpt.
”
”
Dimitri Verhulst (De laatkomer)
“
their stories, tell their tales, pose for pictures, and shake their heads for the TV cameras. As one high school student told the reporter from the Today show, “Nothing much ever happens around here, so this is kind of fun. Sad, but fun at the same time.
”
”
Gregg Olsen (A Wicked Snow)
“
But very often (too often, to my taste) I have been photographed and knew it. Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of "posing". I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image. This transformation is an active one: I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice (...).
”
”
Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography)
“
We were standing there, posing, the rest of us, and could tell the camera wasn't even aimed at us. The guy you wasn't even pretending to take our photo. Do you know how stupid you feel posing for a picture nobody's taking?
”
”
Taylor Jenkins Reid (Daisy Jones & The Six)
“
While white mob violence against African Americans was an obsession in the South, it was not limited to that region. White supremacy was and is an American reality. Whites lynched blacks in nearly every state, including New York, Minnesota, and California. Wherever blacks were present in significant numbers, the threat of being lynched was always real. Blacks had to “watch their step,” no matter where they were in America. A black man could be walking down the road, minding his business, and his life could suddenly change by meeting a white man or a group of white men or boys who on a whim decided to have some fun with a Negro; and this could happen in Mississippi or New York, Arkansas, or Illinois. By the 1890s, lynching fever gripped the South, spreading like cholera, as white communities made blacks their primary target, and torture their focus. Burning the black victim slowly for hours was the chief method of torture. Lynching became a white media spectacle, in which prominent newspapers, like the Atlanta Constitution, announced to the public the place, date, and time of the expected hanging and burning of black victims. Often as many as ten to twenty thousand men, women, and children attended the event. It was a family affair, a ritual celebration of white supremacy, where women and children were often given the first opportunity to torture black victims—burning black flesh and cutting off genitals, fingers, toes, and ears as souvenirs. Postcards were made from the photographs taken of black victims with white lynchers and onlookers smiling as they struck a pose for the camera. They were sold for ten to twenty-five cents to members of the crowd, who then mailed them to relatives and friends, often with a note saying something like this: “This is the barbeque we had last night.”[17]
”
”
James H. Cone (The Cross and the Lynching Tree)
“
He said he enjoyed doing security work for Mr. Jimmerson, keeping nuts and gangsters out of grenade range of the Master, but that one day he hoped to marry a woman who owned a Jeep with raised white letters on the tires. He would take her home and ride around town some. “Look,” the people would say, “there goes Ed in four-wheel drive, with his pretty wife at his side.” The way to get women, he said, was with a camera. Chloroform was no good, at best a makeshift. But all the girls liked to pose for a camera and became immediately submissive to anyone carrying a great tangle of photographic equipment from his shoulders. You didn’t even need film. He said he had once killed a man when he was in the Great Berets by ramming a pencil up his nose and into his brain.
Babcock said, “It’s the Green Berets.”
"What did I say?"
"You said the Great Berets. But you weren’t in the Green Berets or the Great Berets either one, Ed. I don’t know why you want to say things like that. I’ve seen your records."
"I was in a ward with a guy named Danny who was a Green Beret."
"Yes, but that’s not the same thing.
”
”
Charles Portis (Masters of Atlantis)
“
Click. Everyone briefly gathered and posed and smiling at their future selves. Beaches and cathedrals, bumper cars and birthday parties, glasses raised around a dining table. Each picture a little pause between events. No tantrums, no illness, no bad news, all the big stuff happening before and after and in between. The true magic happening only when the lesser magic fails, the ghost daughter who moved during the exposure, her face unreadable but more alive than all her frozen family. Double exposures, as if a little strip of time had been folded back on itself. Scratches and sun flares. Photos torn postdivorce, faces scratched out or Biroed over. The camera telling the truth only when something slips through its silver fingers.
”
”
Mark Haddon (The Red House)
“
I flipped quickly through the pages as I waited—made my family a jerky, imperfect movie. It struck me that my mother had compiled mostly a book of her father, Thomas, and me. Others make appearances: Ray, Dessa, the Anthonys from across the street, the Tusia sisters from next door. But my grandfather, my brother, and I are the stars of my mother’s book. Ma herself, camera-shy and self-conscious about her cleft lip, appears only twice in the family album. In the first picture, she’s one of a line of dour-faced schoolchildren posed on the front step of St. Mary of Jesus Christ Grammar School. (A couple of years ago, the parish sold that dilapidated old schoolhouse to a developer from Massachusetts who converted it into apartments.
”
”
Wally Lamb (I Know This Much Is True)
“
The girl was undeniably beautiful. She was tall, with a spectacular figure. Her white dress, shimmering with crystal beads, was cut low enough to prove the authenticity of her remarkable cleavage. Her long hair was almost white in its blondeness. But it was her face that held Anne’s attention, a face so naturally beautiful that it came as a startling contrast to the theatrical beauty of her hair and figure. It was a perfect face with a fine square jaw, high cheekbones and intelligent brow. The eyes seemed warm and friendly, and the short, straight nose belonged to a beautiful child, as did the even white teeth and little-girl dimples. It was an innocent face, a face that looked at everything with breathless excitement and trusting enthusiasm, seemingly unaware of the commotion the body was causing. A face that glowed with genuine interest in each person who demanded attention, rewarding each with a warm smile. The body and its accouterments continued to pose and undulate for the staring crowd and flashing cameras, but the face ignored the furor and greeted people with the intimacy of meeting a few new friends at a gathering.
”
”
Jacqueline Susann (Valley of the Dolls)
“
In the last week of April 2004, a handful of the Abu Ghraib photographs were broadcast on 60 minutes and published in The New Yorker, and within a couple of days they had been rebroadcast and republished pretty much everywhere on earth. Overnight, the human pyramid, the hooded man on the box, the young woman soldier with a prisoner on a leash, and the corpse packed in ice had become the defining images of the Iraq war...Never before had such primal dungeon scenes been so baldly captured on camera...But above all, it was the posing soldiers, mugging for their buddies' cameras while dominating the prisoners in trophy stances, that gave the photographs the sense of unruly and unmediated reality. The staging was part of the reality they documented. And the grins, the thumbs-up, the arms crossed over puffed-out chests—all this unseemly swagger and self-regard was the height of amateurism. These soldier-photographers stood, at once, inside and outside the events they recorded, watching themselves take part in the spectacle, and their decision not to conceal but to reveal what they were doing indicated that they were not just amateur photographers, but amateur torturers.
So the amateurism was not merely a formal dimension of the Abu Ghraib pictures. It was part of their content, part of what we saw in them, and it corresponded to an aspect of the Iraq War that troubled and baffled nearly everyone: the reckless and slapdash ineptitude with which it had been prosecuted. It was an amateur-run war, a murky and incoherent war. It was not clear why it was waged; too many reasons were given, none had held up, and the stories we invented to explain it to ourselves hardly seemed to matter, since once it was started the war had become its own engine—not a means to an end but an end in itself. What had been billed as a war of ideas and ideals had been exposed as a war of poses and posturing.
”
”
Philip Gourevitch (Standard Operating Procedure)
“
Be honest with yourself. You were at your lowest and broken down. You were unsure and lost hope. You were hiding your fears until you showed them on your sleeve. You felt like everything and everyone was the hammer and you were the nail as they were beating down on you, and it was never-ending. Their empty threats had you scared and you were always running because your weakness was exposed. You were their prey. You didn’t know who to believe because of their mixed signals.
You might not see it now, but you are stronger than you can ever imagine.
You cannot become comfortable in your pain. You have to let the pain that you feel turn you into a rose without thorns. There are sixteen pieces on the chessboard. The king is the most important piece, but the difference is that the queen is the most powerful piece!
You are a queen, you can maneuver around your opponents; they do not have the power over your life, your mind or soul. You might think you’ve been a prisoner, but that is your past’. Look in the now and work your way to how you want your future to be. Exercise your thoughts into a pattern of letting go, and think positively about more of what you want than what you do not want.
Queen!
You are a queen! As a matter of fact, you are the queen! Act as if you know it!
You are powerful, determined, strong, and you can make the biggest and most extravagant move and put it into action.
Lights, camera, strike a pose and own it!
It is yours to own!
Yes, you loved and loved so much. You also lost as well, but you lost hurt, pain, agony, and confusion. You’ve lost interest in wanting to know answers to unanswered questions. You’ve lost the willingness to give a shit about what others think. You’ve surrendered to being fine, that you cannot change the things you have no control over.
You’ve lost a lot, but you’ve gained closure. You are now balanced, centered, focused, and filled with peace surrounding you in your heart, mind, body, and soul.
Your pride was hurt, but you would rather walk alone and be more willing to give and learn more about the queen you are.
You lost yourself in the process, but the more you learn about the new you, the more you will be so much in love with yourself. The more you learn about the new you, the more you will know your worth. The more you learn about the new you, the happier you are going to be, and this time around you will be smiling inside and out!
The dots are now connecting. You feel alive!
You know now that all is not lost. Now that you’ve cut the cord it is time to give your heart a second chance at loving yourself.
Silence your mind. Take a deep breath and close your eyes. As you open your eyes, look at your reflection in the mirror. Aren’t you beautiful, Queen? Embrace who you are. Smile, laugh, welcome the new you and say, “My world is just now beginning.
”
”
Charlena E. Jackson (A Woman's Love Is Never Good Enough)
“
Photography transformed subject into object, and even, one might say, into a museum object: in order to take the first portraits the subject had to assume long poses under a glass roof in bright sunlight; to become an object made one suffer as much as surgical operation; then a device was invented, a kind of prosthesis invisible to the lens, which supported and maintained the body in its passage to immobility: this headrest was the pedestal of the statue I would become, the corset of my imaginary essence.
”
”
Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography)
“
Fiction and life are different; with fiction, the writer does the hard work for us. Fictional characters are easier to 'see,' given a competent novelist--and a competent reader. They are placed at a certain distance, moved this way and that, posed to catch the light, turned to reveal their depth; irony, that infrared camera for filming in the dark, shows them when they are not aware that anyone is looking. But life is different. The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur.
”
”
Julian Barnes (Nothing to Be Frightened Of)
“
Grandma I’ve been writing in names that are missing, the ones I know, which is by no means all of them. That’s what happens, you see. First, there’s no need to write who they are, because everyone knows that’s Great-Aunt Sophia or Cousin Rudi, and then only some of us know, and already we’re asking, ‘Who’s that with Gertrude?’ and ‘I don’t remember this man with the little dog’, and you don’t realise how fast they’re disappearing from being remembered … Wilma It’s still an amazing thing to me, to know the faces of the dead! I can remember Grandpa Jakobovicz’s tobacco-stained whiskers, but his wife died giving birth to Poppa before there were photographs, so now no one knows what she looked like any more than if she’d been some kind of rumour. Grandma Everyone was mad to have a photograph when I was a girl, it was like a miracle and you had to go to a photographer’s to pose for him … wedding couples, soldiers in their first uniforms, children in front of painted scenery … and, always, women dressed up for the carnival ball, posing with a Greek pillar. Later, when we had a camera, there were too many pictures to keep in the album, holiday pictures with real scenery, swimming pictures, pictures of children in dirndl pinafores and lederhosen, like little Austrians. Here’s a couple waving goodbye from the train, but who are they? No idea! That’s why they’re waving goodbye. It’s like a second death, to lose your name in a family album.
”
”
Tom Stoppard (Leopoldstadt)
“
Seriously. I’ve never seen so many camera flashes. Speaking of which, I don’t suppose there’s any way you guys can be less attractive for the next few minutes?” Livvy asked. “You’re drawing almost as much attention as the efflorescence.” Fitz grinned—and a girl who’d been watching him tripped over her own feet. “You guys have plenty of admirers too,” Sophie had to point out, nudging her chin toward several adults who were snapping pictures of Grady and Livvy as if they thought they were celebrities. “I think Tam’s causing the biggest stir,” Biana said, tilting her head toward an entire busload of schoolgirls who were shamelessly gawking. “Great,” Tam grumbled, pulling his bangs lower over his eyes—which only seemed to make the group swoon more. “Be glad Keefe’s not here,” Fitz told him as they strode deeper into the field. “He’d be calling them over and making you pose for photos.
”
”
Shannon Messenger (Nightfall (Keeper of the Lost Cities, #6))
“
Some of the pictures have knife slashes across the bodies. Along the ribs. Some of them neatly decapitate the head of the naked body with scratches. These exist alongside the genuine scars mentioned before, the appendix scar and other non-surgical. They reflect each other, the eye moves back and forth. The cuts add a three-dimensional quality to each work. Not just physically, though you can almost see the depth of the knife slashes, but also because you think of Bellocq wanting to enter the photographs, to leave his trace on the bodies. When this happened, being too much of a gentleman to make them pose holding or sucking his cock, the camera on a timer, when this happened he had to romance them later with a knife. You can see the care he took defiling the beauty he had forced in them was as precise and clean as his good hands which at night had developed the negatives, floating the sheets in the correct acids and watching the faces and breasts and pubic triangles and sofas emerge. The making and destroying coming from the same source, same lust, same surgery his brain was capable of.
”
”
Michael Ondaatje (Coming Through Slaughter)
“
You go through life thinking there’s so much you need. Your favorite jeans and sweater. The jacket with the faux-fur lining to keep you warm. Your phone and your music and your favorite books. Mascara. Irish Breakfast tea and cappuccinos from Trouble Coffee. You need your yearbooks, every stiffly posed school-dance photo, the notes your friends slipped into your locker. You need the camera you got for your sixteenth birthday and the flowers you dried. You need your notebooks full of the things you learned and don’t want to forget. You need your bedspread, white with black diamonds. You need your pillow—it fits the way you sleep. You need magazines promising self-improvement. You need your running shoes and your sandals and your boots. Your grade report from the semester you got straight As. Your prom dress, your shiny earrings, your pendants on delicate chains. You need your underwear, your light-colored bras and your black ones. The watercolor sunset hanging above your bed. The dozens and dozens of shells in glass jars. You think you need all of it. Until you leave with only your phone, your wallet, and a picture of your mother.
”
”
Nina LaCour (We Are Okay)
“
And that’s why you are a brilliant choice for pilot. Octogenarian Grandmother Paves Way for Humanity.”
“You can’t pave the stars. I’m not a grandmother. And I’m sixty-three not eighty.”
“It’s a figure of speech. The point is that you’re a PR goldmine.”
I had known that they asked me to helm this mission because of my age—it would be a lot to ask of someone who had a full life ahead of them. Maybe I was naive to think that my experience in establishing the Mars colony was considered valuable.
How can I explain the degree to which I resented being used for publicity? This wasn’t a new thing by a long shot. My entire career has been about exploitation for publicity. I had known it, and exploited it too, once I’d realized the power of having my uniform tailored to show my shape a little more clearly. You think they would have sent me to Mars if it weren’t intended to be a colony? I was there to show all the lady housewives that they could go to space too. Posing in my flight suit, with my lips painted red, I had smiled at more cameras than my colleagues.
I stared Garrett Biggs and his fork. “For someone in PR, you are awfully blunt.
”
”
Mary Robinette Kowal (The Lady Astronaut of Mars)
“
Darwin singled out the eye as posing a particularly challenging problem: 'To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.' Creationists gleefully quote this sentence again and again. Needless to say, they never quote what follows. Darwin's fulsomely free confession turned out to be a rhetorical device. He was drawing his opponents towards him so that his punch, when it came, struck the harder. The punch, of course, was Darwin's effortless explanation of exactly how the eye evolved by gradual degrees. Darwin may not have used the phrase 'irreducible complexity', or 'the smooth gradient up Mount Improbable', but he clearly understood the principle of both. 'What is the use of half an eye?' and 'What is the use of half a wing?' are both instances of the argument from 'irreducible complexity'. A functioning unit is said to be irreducibly complex if the removal of one of its parts causes the whole to cease functioning. This has been assumed to be self-evident for both eyes and wings. But as soon as we give these assumptions a moment's thought, we immediately see the fallacy. A cataract patient with the lens of her eye surgically removed can't see clear images without glasses, but can see enough not to bump into a tree or fall over a cliff. Half a wing is indeed not as good as a whole wing, but it is certainly better than no wing at all. Half a wing could save your life by easing your fall from a tree of a certain height. And 51 per cent of a wing could save you if you fall from a slightly taller tree. Whatever fraction of a wing you have, there is a fall from which it will save your life where a slightly smaller winglet would not. The thought experiment of trees of different height, from which one might fall, is just one way to see, in theory, that there must be a smooth gradient of advantage all the way from 1 per cent of a wing to 100 per cent. The forests are replete with gliding or parachuting animals illustrating, in practice, every step of the way up that particular slope of Mount Improbable. By analogy with the trees of different height, it is easy to imagine situations in which half an eye would save the life of an animal where 49 per cent of an eye would not. Smooth gradients are provided by variations in lighting conditions, variations in the distance at which you catch sight of your prey—or your predators. And, as with wings and flight surfaces, plausible intermediates are not only easy to imagine: they are abundant all around the animal kingdom. A flatworm has an eye that, by any sensible measure, is less than half a human eye. Nautilus (and perhaps its extinct ammonite cousins who dominated Paleozoic and Mesozoic seas) has an eye that is intermediate in quality between flatworm and human. Unlike the flatworm eye, which can detect light and shade but see no image, the Nautilus 'pinhole camera' eye makes a real image; but it is a blurred and dim image compared to ours. It would be spurious precision to put numbers on the improvement, but nobody could sanely deny that these invertebrate eyes, and many others, are all better than no eye at all, and all lie on a continuous and shallow slope up Mount Improbable, with our eyes near a peak—not the highest peak but a high one.
”
”
Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)
“
As I became older, I was given many masks to wear. I could be a laborer laying railroad tracks across the continent, with long hair in a queue to be pulled by pranksters; a gardener trimming the shrubs while secretly planting a bomb; a saboteur before the day of infamy at Pearl Harbor, signaling the Imperial Fleet; a kamikaze pilot donning his headband somberly, screaming 'Banzai' on my way to my death; a peasant with a broad-brimmed straw hat in a rice paddy on the other side of the world, stooped over to toil in the water; an obedient servant in the parlor, a houseboy too dignified for my own good; a washerman in the basement laundry, removing stains using an ancient secret; a tyrant intent on imposing my despotism on the democratic world, opposed by the free and the brave; a party cadre alongside many others, all of us clad in coordinated Mao jackets; a sniper camouflaged in the trees of the jungle, training my gunsights on G.I. Joe; a child running with a body burning from napalm, captured in an unforgettable photo; an enemy shot in the head or slaughtered by the villageful; one of the grooms in a mass wedding of couples, having met my mate the day before through our cult leader; an orphan in the last airlift out of a collapsed capital, ready to be adopted into the good life; a black belt martial artist breaking cinderblocks with his head, in an advertisement for Ginsu brand knives with the slogan 'but wait--there's more' as the commercial segued to show another free gift; a chef serving up dog stew, a trick on the unsuspecting diner; a bad driver swerving into the next lane, exactly as could be expected; a horny exchange student here for a year, eager to date the blonde cheerleader; a tourist visiting, clicking away with his camera, posing my family in front of the monuments and statues; a ping pong champion, wearing white tube socks pulled up too high and batting the ball with a wicked spin; a violin prodigy impressing the audience at Carnegie Hall, before taking a polite bow; a teen computer scientist, ready to make millions on an initial public offering before the company stock crashes; a gangster in sunglasses and a tight suit, embroiled in a turf war with the Sicilian mob; an urban greengrocer selling lunch by the pound, rudely returning change over the counter to the black patrons; a businessman with a briefcase of cash bribing a congressman, a corrupting influence on the electoral process; a salaryman on my way to work, crammed into the commuter train and loyal to the company; a shady doctor, trained in a foreign tradition with anatomical diagrams of the human body mapping the flow of life energy through a multitude of colored points; a calculus graduate student with thick glasses and a bad haircut, serving as a teaching assistant with an incomprehensible accent, scribbling on the chalkboard; an automobile enthusiast who customizes an imported car with a supercharged engine and Japanese decals in the rear window, cruising the boulevard looking for a drag race; a illegal alien crowded into the cargo hold of a smuggler's ship, defying death only to crowd into a New York City tenement and work as a slave in a sweatshop.
My mother and my girl cousins were Madame Butterfly from the mail order bride catalog, dying in their service to the masculinity of the West, and the dragon lady in a kimono, taking vengeance for her sisters. They became the television newscaster, look-alikes with their flawlessly permed hair.
Through these indelible images, I grew up. But when I looked in the mirror, I could not believe my own reflection because it was not like what I saw around me. Over the years, the world opened up. It has become a dizzying kaleidoscope of cultural fragments, arranged and rearranged without plan or order.
”
”
Frank H. Wu (Yellow)
“
YOU GO THROUGH LIFE thinking there’s so much you need. Your favorite jeans and sweater. The jacket with the faux-fur lining to keep you warm. Your phone and your music and your favorite books. Mascara. Irish Breakfast tea and cappuccinos from Trouble Coffee. You need your yearbooks, every stiffly posed school-dance photo, the notes your friends slipped into your locker. You need the camera you got for your sixteenth birthday and the flowers you dried. You need your notebooks full of the things you learned and don’t want to forget. You need your bedspread, white with black diamonds. You need your pillow—it fits the way you sleep. You need magazines promising self-improvement. You need your running shoes and your sandals and your boots. Your grade report from the semester you got straight As. Your prom dress, your shiny earrings, your pendants on delicate chains. You need your underwear, your light-colored bras and your black ones. The watercolor sunset hanging above your bed. The dozens and dozens of shells in glass jars. The cab was waiting outside the station. The airport, I said, but no sound came out. “The airport,” I said, and we pulled away. You think you need all of it. Until you leave with only your phone, your wallet, and a picture of your mother.
”
”
Nina LaCour (We Are Okay)
“
In 1972, Sara Kapp had been living for some time at Karmê Chöling without daring to ask to speak to Chögyam Trungpa. But when a New York modeling agency wanted to sign her as a model, she decided to ask his advice. Posing in front of the camera all day did not seem appropriate for someone who was trying to cut through her ego.
Chögyam Trungpa asked her why she wanted to become a model. She explained how she had experienced some difficulty in sticking to any one thing after finishing college. So she thought that maybe picking out something for a few years might be beneficial.
If that is the reason, he replied, then there’s no problem. He encouraged her to follow her career, and as she continued to hesitate, he told her: “The only obstacle I can see is if you do this work hoping to earn lots of money or to be on the cover of Vogue. That would be sad, because you’d be losing youself in the future. It’s a real shame when people regret not having enough money, or having missed a career opportunity, because they are then fixing themselves in the past. It’s very, very sad.” Then staring into her eyes, he repeated: “It’s very, very, very sad because that way we miss out on the present, and the present is marvelous.” She went on to become one of the best-known runway models of her day. For a period of time, one could find mannequins of Sara Kapp in Saks and other epxensive department stores throughout the United States. Her last major modeling contract was as the first Princes Borghese for Revlon. She now works behind the scenes in the fashion industry in Milan.
”
”
Fabrice Midal (Chogyam Trungpa: His Life and Vision)
“
After three weeks of lectures and receptions in New York, Einstein paid a visit to Washington. For reasons fathomable only by those who live in that capital, the Senate decided to debate the theory of relativity. Among the leaders asserting that it was incomprehensible were Pennsylvania Republican Boies Penrose, famous for once uttering that “public office is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” and Mississippi Democrat John Sharp Williams, who retired a year later, saying, “I’d rather be a dog and bay at the moon than stay in the Senate another six years.” On the House side of the Capitol, Representative J. J. Kindred of New York proposed placing an explanation of Einstein’s theories in the Congressional Record. David Walsh of Massachusetts rose to object. Did Kindred understand the theory? “I have been earnestly busy with this theory for three weeks,” he replied, “and am beginning to see some light.” But what relevance, he was asked, did it have to the business of Congress? “It may bear upon the legislation of the future as to general relations with the cosmos.” Such discourse made it inevitable that, when Einstein went with a group to the White House on April 25, President Warren G. Harding would be faced with the question of whether he understood relativity. As the group posed for cameras, President Harding smiled and confessed that he did not comprehend the theory at all. The Washington Post carried a cartoon showing him puzzling over a paper titled “Theory of Relativity” while Einstein puzzled over one on the “Theory of Normalcy,” which was the name Harding gave to his governing philosophy. The New York Times ran a page 1 headline: “Einstein Idea Puzzles Harding, He Admits.
”
”
Walter Isaacson (Einstein: His Life and Universe)
“
In contrast, technology now exists that would allow a future global totalitarian state to record every phone call, email, web search, webpage view and credit card transaction for every person on Earth, and to monitor everyone’s whereabouts through cell-phone tracking and surveillance cameras with face recognition. Moreover, machine learning technology far short of human-level AGI can efficiently analyze and synthesize these masses of data to identify suspected seditious behavior, enabling potential troublemakers to be neutralized before they have a chance to pose any serious challenge to the state.
”
”
Max Tegmark (Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)
“
There you two are,” Nina calls.
She offers a smile almost identical to Chiara’s when she’s up to something. Nina drops Tate’s hand and presses the power button on her point-and-shoot camera. She motions for Darren and me to get closer together, but we’re like rocks.
“Come on, I want a picture,” she prompts.
Darren doesn’t move, so I walk over to him and leave a few inches between us. Nina huffs and reaches for Darren’s arm, wrapping it behind my head and resting his hand on my shoulder. My bare shoulder!
“Nina--” Darren starts to gripe.
“Shut up, I’m giving you direction. You two are pathetic.” She stands by Tate again and takes a picture of us. “Smiling won’t kill you, doll.”
“I am smiling,” I say through gritted teeth, Darren’s hand burning into my skin.
She puts a fist on her hip and shifts her weight impatiently. “Not you. Him.”
I turn to look at Darren, but he’s still holding on to me and my body sort of melts into his. He turns his face to mine too and I bite back a nervous laugh, which makes him crack a smile.
“Finally,” Nina says as she takes a couple more pictures.
My smile stretches ear to ear and I’m completely lost in Darren’s deep eyes. Nina’s still chattering on, probably asking us to change poses, but I don’t hear any of it and Darren doesn’t seem to either. It’s just us. Me and the boy I watched fall asleep last night. The same cute face I stared at until my eyes burned with heaviness and forced me to close them. The hand on my bare shoulder is the same one that still held a loose grip on mine this morning when I woke up.
My head is light and my fingers shake, but I can’t stop smiling. He’s so close. All he has to do is lean--
“Where’s the mistletoe when you need it?” Nina’s voice cuts through my thoughts.
His eyes dart to my lips for an instant and his smile falls. “I think you got enough pictures, Nina,” Darren says.
”
”
Kristin Rae (Wish You Were Italian (If Only . . . #2))
“
The photograph had to be reasonably interesting. Country Life girls did not simply sit for the camera against some featureless backdrop but were pictured striking a pose in surroundings that gave an indication of their normal social milieu or talents. The daughters of major gentry—those with stately homes—might be photographed leaning against a stone pillar, the clear inference being that this was just one of the many stone pillars owned by her father; those who had no stone pillars but who had, say, a small ornamental lake, would be photographed standing in front of this. Those who worked with horses—and this was a large group—might have a hunter in the background, or at least a saddle. Dogs were a popular accoutrement, usually Labradors, who would be at the young woman’s side, ready to retrieve or flush birds, enthusiasts all, and given the same appraising scrutiny by the readers, in many cases, as the young woman herself.
”
”
Alexander McCall Smith (Emma: A Modern Retelling)
“
In some cases they were clearly posing for the painter, they gazed into what I thought of as the lens or camera eye, although of course the concept was an anachronism, they would have been gazing not into an apparatus but directly at the painter himself. The idea was almost impossibly personal, and I realized the notion of such a sustained human gaze was outside the realm of experience today. For that reason, the paintings opened up a dimension that you did not normally see in photographs, in these paintings you could feel the weight of time passing.
”
”
Katie Kitamura (Intimacies)
“
The thing about taking someone’s photograph is to get them not to think about the fact that I’m taking their photograph. People stiffen up in front of a camera. It’s human nature. They think they’re supposed to pose, and suddenly they’re not who they really are. So the photographer has to devise a way to catch them in a moment when they . . . I suppose you’d say in a moment when they reveal themselves. Every photographer has to do this.
”
”
Elizabeth George (Something to Hide (Inspector Lynley, #21))
“
February 17: Andre de Dienes publishes a color photograph of Norma Jeane on the cover of Parade. He shoots her from her left side. She is wearing a green sweater and yellow-gold slacks in a strongly diagonal shot that shows her posed against a mountainside, her right and left hands touching a rock face, her right knee bent as though she is climbing. She is smiling and looking directly at the camera. Her sleeves are rolled up, and on her left arm is a lady’s watch. The photograph was taken in Death Valley in 1945.
”
”
Carl Rollyson (Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events)
“
One life has been touched and changed for the better… my own. I leave you tonight with a revelation and the answer to a question posed to me some weeks ago by Nicholas Sullivan himself: yes….” Tait stared pointedly in the camera, his face filled with wonder. “Yes, Nick, it is worth the risk. For the promise of a bright tomorrow, for all that it will mean not only to the people of today, but for generations yet to come. It truly is… worth the risk.” After a pause, he concluded, “This is Tait Williams reporting from Houston. Good night.
”
”
Jeremy Pack (To Touch the Stars)
“
January 28: Marilyn attends a March of Dimes fashion show at the Waldorf Astoria, held to benefit children with polio. She is photoraphed with several children, smiling and talking with them, as well as posing for the camera.
”
”
Carl Rollyson (Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events)
“
Picasso
When Picasso would pose for a photo along side his mistress
he'd always shatter the camera lens first.
”
”
Beryl Dov
“
March 8: Love Happy is released. Marilyn’s total screen time is thirty-eight seconds—long enough for Groucho to respond to her slinking into his detective agency office with the question, “Is there anything I can do for you?” He promptly responds, “What a ridiculous statement.” Marilyn tells him that men keep following her and sways out of camera range as Groucho comments, “Really? I can’t understand why.” Marilyn later recalled, “There were three girls there and Groucho had us each walk away from him. . . . I was the only one he asked to do it twice. Then he whispered in my ear, ‘You have the prettiest ass in the business.’ I’m sure he meant it in the nicest way.” Groucho later said Marilyn was “Mae West, Theda Bara and Bo Peep rolled into one.” Marilyn received $500 for her appearance and another three hundred to pose for promotional photographs. Marilyn is sent on a promotional tour for a fee of one hundred dollars a week. She meets dress manufacturer Henry Rosenfeld in New York City, and they become lifelong friends. During this period she also does her famous Jones Beach photo sessions with Andre de Dienes. The tour takes her to Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Rockford, Illinois. Marilyn attends a party at the Chicago nightclub Ricketts with Roddy McDowell. Marilyn appears in print advertisement for Kyron diet pills, with accompanying text: “If you want slim youthful lines like Miss Monroe and other stars, start the KYRON Way to slenderness—today!
”
”
Carl Rollyson (Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events)
“
April 19: Norma Jeane attends a picnic at Balboa Park with her fellow workers. Photographs show her with long curled hair, standing and sitting in the center of a lineup with four other women, posing for the camera.
”
”
Carl Rollyson (Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events)
“
Some people argue with the question posed to them, as Bill Clinton infamously did when he said under oath: “It depends on what your definition of is is.” Others veer off on verbal tangents, hoping to steer the conversation in another direction. Some celebrities arrange to talk to the cameras outside a hearing room just as the main witness against them is about to speak. Some say they need to check their records before answering. And many people use the one catchall that usually cannot be disproved: I don’t recall. That last option would seem unavailable to Trump, since he declared in October that he enjoys “the world’s greatest memory.” Trump
”
”
David Cay Johnston (The Making of Donald Trump)
“
tilted and her eyes crinkled with amusement, Julia gazed into the distance. Millie was looking at Julia and laughing happily. The pair were obviously enjoying a funny moment together, their pose completely natural as they focused on each other and whatever it was they had shared, the two of them completely unaware of the camera. Julia’s big brown eyes and long dark hair were set off beautifully by the pretty pink top she was wearing, while Millie’s blue T-shirt contrasted with it perfectly. It really was a gorgeous photo and gave a true impression of how close they were. Another picture showed the two of them dressed up in really cool Halloween outfits. They both looked amazing and I thought about how much fun that night must have been.
”
”
Katrina Kahler (My New Life (Mind Reader, #1))
“
My fellow Americans, it has come to my attention that some of you are frightened by the idea of … an infectious outbreak. I must tell you that some of our allied countries have suffered an outbreak of an unknown sickness, but the results are minor and surely do not cause,” he sighed, “hostile reanimated corpses. There have been some precautionary methods to help prevent the spread of this illness into our fair country. Air and sea travel have been halted for a short time. Some malicious websites attempting to spread panic and lies have been temporarily disabled.” His eyes kept glancing away from the camera. “My fellow Americans, there is nothing to concern yourselves with at this time. Please continue to go to work and enjoy your free time as normal. The only disaster would be to dig ourselves into a financial hole trying to hide from something that doesn’t pose a threat. I can assure you that,” he spoke before being interrupted by the sound of gunfire.
”
”
James Barton (Decaying Humanity)
“
Correction officers struck adolescents in the head and face at “an alarming rate” as punishment, even when inmates posed no threat; officers took inmates to isolated areas for beatings out of view of video cameras; and many inmates were so afraid of the violence that they asked, for their own protection, to go to solitary confinement, the report said.
”
”
Anonymous
“
At Northwest Orient, one early idea was to stage a photo with a group of Crow Indians. In front of a Northwest plane, the Indians wore headdresses and moccasins and posed for the camera stone-faced and bare-chested. “If the Indians aren’t afraid of the white man’s bird, nobody else should be,” a Northwest pilot said.
”
”
Geoffrey Gray (Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper)
“
He stood to the side, arms crossed over his chest as he watched Ashanti pose in an airy, soft peach dress with a crown of colorful flowers propped on her head. Duchess looked as if she had been made for the camera in her matching peach tutu. Even a non-dog lover like him couldn't deny that she was cute with her flower crown askew on her head and her stubby tail wagging like a flag in a windstorm.
”
”
Farrah Rochon (Pardon My Frenchie)
“
Jadaan, he could be unpredictable. The producers were worried Valentino would get tossed, so he mostly rode other horses for the film. Valentino was furious and insulted.” He pursed his lips. “They were idiots, those producers; Valentino could ride.” Hosteen fell silent, and Anna tried to think of a question to get him going again. Before she did, he said, “That Jadaan. He had terrible front legs. But he was as good as Valentino himself at striking a pose. Cameras loved him.
”
”
Patricia Briggs (Dead Heat (Alpha & Omega, #4))
“
The most beautiful of all photographs are those taken of savages in their natural surroundings. The savage is always confronting death, and he confronts the lens in exactly the same manner. He does not ham it up, nor is he indifferent. He always poses; he faces up to the camera. His achievement is to transform this technical operation into a face-to-face confrontation with death.
This is what makes these pictures such powerful and intense photographic objects. As soon as the lens fails to capture this pose, this provocative obscenity of the object facing death, as soon as the subject begins to collude with the lens, and the photographer too becomes subjective, the 'great game' of photography is over. Exoticism is dead. Today it is very hard indeed to find a subject - or even an object - that does not collude with the camera lens.
The only trick here, generally speaking, is to be ignorant of how one's subjects live. This gives them a certain aura of mystery, a savagery, which the successful picture captures. It also captures a gleam of ingenuity, of fatality, in their faces, betraying the fact that they do not know who they are or how they live. A glow of impotence and awe that is completely lacking in our tribes of worldly, devious, fashion-conscious and self-regarding people, always well-versed in the subject of themselves - and hence devoid of all mystery. For such people the camera is merciless.
”
”
Jean Baudrillard (The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena)
“
The invitation came from Studio Morra in Naples: Come and perform whatever you want. It was early 1975. With the scandalized reactions of the Belgrade press fresh in my mind, I planned a piece in which the audience would provide the action. I would merely be the object, the receptacle.
My plan was to go to the gallery and just stand there, in black trousers and a black T-shirt, behind a table containing seventy-two objects: A hammer. A saw. A feather. A fork. A bottle of perfume. A bowler hat. An ax. A rose. A bell. Scissors. Needles. A pen. Honey. A lamb bone. A carving knife. A mirror. A newspaper. A shawl. Pins. Lipstick. Sugar. A Polaroid camera. Various other things. And a pistol, and one bullet lying next to it.
When a big crowd had gathered at eight P.M., they found these instructions on the table:
There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired.
I am the object.
During this period I take full responsibility.
Duration: 6 hours (8pm - 2am)
Slowly at first and then quickly, things began to happen. It was very interesting: for the most part, the women in the gallery would tell the men what to do to me, rather than do it themselves (although later on, when someone stuck a pin into me, one woman wiped the tears from my eyes). For the most part, these were just normal members of the Italian art establishment and their wives. Ultimately I think the reason I wasn’t raped was that the wives were there.
As evening turned into late night, a certain air of sexuality arose in the room. This came not from me but from the audience. We were in southern Italy, where the Catholic Church was so powerful, and there was this strong Madonna/whore dichotomy in attitudes toward women.
After three hours, one man cut my shirt apart with the scissors and took it off. People manipulated me into various poses. If they turned my head down, I kept it down; if they turned it up, I kept it that way. I was a puppet—entirely passive. Bare-breasted, I stood there, and someone put the bowler hat on my head. With the lipstick, someone else wrote IO SONO LIBERO—“I am free”—on the mirror and stuck it in my hand. Someone else took the lipstick and wrote END across my forehead. A guy took Polaroids of me and stuck them in my hand, like playing cards.
Things got more intense. A couple of people picked me up and carried me around. They put me on the table, spread my legs, stuck the knife in the table close to my crotch.
Someone stuck pins into me. Someone else slowly poured a glass of water over my head. Someone cut my neck with the knife and sucked the blood. I still have the scar.
There was one man—a very small man—who just stood very close to me, breathing heavily. This man scared me. Nobody else, nothing else, did. But he did. After a while, he put the bullet in the pistol and put the pistol in my right hand. He moved the pistol toward my neck and touched the trigger. There was a murmur in the crowd, and someone grabbed him. A scuffle broke out.
Some of the audience obviously wanted to protect me; others wanted the performance to continue. This being southern Italy, voices were raised; tempers flared. The little man was hustled out of the gallery and the piece continued. In fact, the audience became more and more active, as if in a trance.
And then, at two A.M., the gallerist came and told me the six hours were up. I stopped staring and looked directly at the audience. “The performance is over,” the gallerist said. “Thank you.”
I looked like hell. I was half naked and bleeding; my hair was wet. And a strange thing happened: at this moment, the people who were still there suddenly became afraid of me. As I walked toward them, they ran out of the gallery.
”
”
Marina Abramović
“
Before our last song, I thanked my aunt and uncle for coming, looking up at them on the balcony. "Emo, welcome to my hoesa," I said, extending an arm to the crowd. Welcome to my office. The band posed for a picture with our fingers in the heart pose Nami taught us, the sold-out crowd in the background. Dozens of kids left the venue with sleeves of vinyl held under their arms, fanning out into the city streets, my mother's face on the cover, her hand reaching toward the camera like she's just let go of the hand of someone below.
”
”
Michelle Zauner (Crying in H Mart)
“
Robbie, at the moment, was very much full of hell. I was trying out a big Zoomar telescopic lens on my new Bell & Howell movie camera, holding on Robbie while she danced and pranced. She posed, flew around, wiggled a little. The word for it was: sensational.
”
”
Richard S. Prather (Shell Scott PI Mystery Series, Volume Three)
“
Candid photography has taken the world by storm, and Hyderabad, with its vibrant culture and rich traditions, is no exception. In a city where every corner seems to have a story to tell, candid photographers in Hyderabad play a crucial role in capturing the moments that often go unnoticed.
Candid photograper in Hyderabad has become immensely popular in recent years, and Hyderabad is no stranger to this trend. The allure of candid photography lies in its ability to capture genuine, unscripted moments. Unlike traditional posed photography, candid photography aims to document the raw emotions and authentic interactions that occur during events, such as weddings, parties, and cultural celebrations.
Hyderabad's rich tapestry of traditions, festivals, and cultural events provides the perfect backdrop for candid photographers to work their magic. The technical aspects of photography are equally important. Candid photographers in Hyderabad need to be proficient in handling various camera equipment, including high-quality lenses and accessories.
”
”
chickpallavi
“
Candid photography has taken the world by storm, and Hyderabad, with its vibrant culture and rich traditions, is no exception. In a city where every corner seems to have a story to tell, candid photographers in Hyderabad play a crucial role in capturing the moments that often go unnoticed.
Candid photograpers in Hyderabad has become immensely popular in recent years, and Hyderabad is no stranger to this trend. The allure of candid photography lies in its ability to capture genuine, unscripted moments. Unlike traditional posed photography, candid photography aims to document the raw emotions and authentic interactions that occur during events, such as weddings, parties, and cultural celebrations.
Hyderabad's rich tapestry of traditions, festivals, and cultural events provides the perfect backdrop for candid photographers to work their magic. The technical aspects of photography are equally important. Candid photographers in Hyderabad need to be proficient in handling various camera equipment, including high-quality lenses and accessories.
”
”
chickmanu
“
On another point: King Leopold’s Ghost reproduces some of the photographs of Congo atrocities that fueled the worldwide protests against Leopold’s rule during the first decade of the twentieth century. These “fake photos,” Gilley declares, were “staged” by the photographer. Yes, some images appear posed—something true of most photos everywhere in an era when cameras were bulky contraptions on tripods whose subjects had to remain still for a few seconds.
”
”
Adam Hochschild (The Ghost Still Haunts: Adam Hochschild responds to Bruce Gilley, who follows in kind)
“
When in doubt, go for a three-quarter pose at the camera. It’s an angle that captures the best of the cheekbones, the chin line, and a long neck.
”
”
RuPaul (GuRu)
“
Something changed when Africans began to take photographs of one another: you can see it in the way they look at the camera, in the poses, the attitude. The difference between the images taken by colonialists or white adventurers and those made for the sitter’s personal use is especially striking in photographs of women. In the former, women are being looked at against their will, captive to a controlling gaze. In the latter, they look at themselves as in a mirror, an activity that always involves seriousness, levity, and an element of wonder.
”
”
Teju Cole (Known and Strange Things: Essays)
“
Still, they were clearly at ease in front of the camera. They behaved as if they were professionals, that was a function of the age we lived in, people took photographs of themselves all day long, in every act and situation, eating their breakfast, sitting on the train, standing in front of the mirror. The effect was not a new candidness or verisimilitude to the photographs that proliferated—on our phones, computers, on the Internet—but rather the opposite: the artifice of photography had infiltrated our daily lives. We pose all the time, even when we are not being photographed at all.
”
”
Katie Kitamura (A Separation)
“
And when I say “think,” I want you to think about the subject, the location, the perspective, the lighting, the timing, the weather, the mood, the pose, the clothes, the expression, the composition, and yes, the camera settings. That’s a lot to absorb,
”
”
Tony Northrup (Tony Northrup's DSLR Book: How to Create Stunning Digital Photography)
“
For Baudrillard, phenomena such as fly on the wall documentaries and political opinion polls - both of which claimed to present reality in an unmediated way - would always pose an insoluble dilemma. Did the presence of the cameras affect the behavior of those being filmed? Would the publication of poll results affect the future behavior of voters? Such questions were undecidable, and therefore 'reality' would always be elusive: at the very moment when it seemed that it was being grasped into the raw, reality transformed into what Baudrillard, in a much misunderstood neologism, called 'hyperreality'.
”
”
Mark Fisher (Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?)
“
Obama was bemused. He stood before cameras and the assembled Washington press, having just released a copy of his birth certificate, laughed, and then noted that the country should be moving on to more important business. He did not believe this theory of illegitimacy posed any real threat to him, his agenda, or his legacy.
”
”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy)