Silent Echo

The gallery that stood out the most to me was in the museum of contemporary photography. When first walking into this place, I was highly doubtful this was going to be a fun time. If an art museum was kind of fun, I wasn’t sure how much better a photography museum would be. I get this thinking because I really don’t see photography and video making as “art”. Art to me is someone making something out of nothing by their bare hands.  Famous painters use paint brushes, sculptors use their hands, musicians use their hands on instruments and singers use their body. Using some kind of tool and pushing a button does not cut it for me. There has to be a strong connection between the artist and his craft. I had this thinking up until I came across a stair case in the museum.

                They had put six or eight TV’s on a ledge onto the case. On the screens, they had famous talk show people and important political figures, basically huge media icons. There was something different about these people though; they were not talking. They were just standing there, not doing anything but you can tell they were alive in the video. I read about it and the artist got a hold of these recordings of the people during interviews. They were not talking because they were waiting to go on live TV, or the camera was just not on them. This is an awesome idea because it shows you a different way to look at these famous people we see almost every day. You can see someone wiping their nose or scratching their head, something you wouldn’t think of Obama doing. This tied into that one lecture about how the brain sees and views people. We think all high and mighty of these icons, but seeing them as normal everyday people was very interesting to me.           

                We shouldn’t think people are bigger than us or mean more just because they made it on TV. Behind that powerful camera is a man or woman just like you or me, or once was. Even Obama was once a college student doing papers like these, though I don’t think he was in a summer schooling program.