Photograph To Remember By Pedro Meyer example essay topic

In the article, Family Photograph Appreciation, Richard Chalfen discusses a teenage view of the relation between family snapshots and home videos. He first explains the value of personal photos using an example of natural or humanly coerced disasters and the mourning of visual traces of the past, or in other words, photographs. Family photographs are a very important aspect of peoples lives and without them we may never remember our past. By looking at snapshots, slides, home movies, etc, we stimulate our memory of important dates and events.

He asks many questions about memory and video verses photography which will be discussed with teens he has interviewed. Chalfen has structured an exploratory project that asked a small sample of thirty teenagers, living in the Cambridge / Boston areas of Massachusetts to evaluate the relative merits of using still photography and / or vs. ideography as a preferred medium of family photography. (Richard Chalfen) He conducted the interviews with two teens at a time while having a meal in a small restaurant. He was interested in their opinions on comparing photography, which came out to be very interesting. The teens explained to him about the effects of video tapes and how they were a way of " being there" all over again. Some of them felt it was more realistic than flipping through a picture album.

Here we will introduce a few more of the theories made by teens during their interviews. Videotapes seem to supply the viewer with more information and makes it easy to remember. You get sound and movement to enhance the overall effect which brings you to seethe whole experience. In many interviews the teens did not feel that videos were the best way togo.

By looking at photographs it set off a whole lot of memories, not just what happened play byplay like a home video. By looking at photographs you can use your imagination and over the years the stories from one picture will grow and change. You don't have to think when you watch videos but by looking at photographs you search your memory for the details. One girl explained that she can look at photos over and over but watching a video will get boring after a few times.

Perhaps we can conclude from this that there is a higher liking of still photographs over vs. ideography by most teens. They seem to be willing to put some work into collecting this important information. To explain the difference, Chalfen discusses some examples, such as the two acting as memory aids in their own significant way. High vs. low context is also a difference between the two.

Videos are high context, which means to carry all the visual cues necessary make an appropriate interpretation. Photos are low context which is that users must supply the information necessary to make sense of the image. When looking into human memory we realize that most personal memories are still images and are not usually moving. Chalfen has concluded that photography may play a very active role in future studies of memory and family photograph collections are an important aspect of this. He feels that there is much more we can learn from teens using their views of media. After watching the online photo essay, "I Photograph to Remember", by Pedro Meyer, I have observed that to some people photographs can document every aspect of their lives.

As Chalfen has discussed, photographs are a way of triggering your mind to look back into the past and relive a memory. Pedro Meyer took several pictures throughout his entire life of his family going through happy or even rough experiences. Perhaps this was his way of coping with what was to come in the end. Some people might find it disturbing for a grown man to find joy in taking pictures of his dying mother and father but he thought that by doing this he may someday understand why any of these terrible things happened to them. To contrast the association with image and memory between Pedro Meyer and the character played by Robin Williams in "One Hour Photo", I noticed that Williams used his photo collection to "belong" to a family that he never had. Pedro, on the other hand, used them to understand situations more easily.

We learn from these two different sets of material that photographs are very important to the world and who knows what they will be used for in the future.