"On ***** Media"

I love Hovagimyan's comparison between paintings and photographs. It made me realize that a photograph, while obviously a piece of art, is also a piece of history. It's a piece of information. A painting can be whatever you want it to be, but when you take a picture, you're creating a still image of something, a moment in time of some sort of event, that has actually happened. In a way, you are establishing history by locking a moment into place and informing the world that you believe that moment is important.

This is a painting that depicts the Civil War as a brave, heroic time. The giant confederate flag waving through the air epitomizes this theme of glorifying war.

This is a website that depicts true photographs taken from the Civil War- as you can see, there are stark differences between these photographs and that painting. These photographs depict the true nature of war, and we know that they are true because a photograph represents reality, while a painting depicts something we create from our own imagination.

Of course, photographs can be edited. These days, anyone can learn how to use a photoshop in a matter of hours. But these pictures depict a time when photoshop didn't exist- this is the time when photographs could truly be taken as they are. I think that's why film became so wildly popular in such a short amount of time- as Hovagimyan mentions, film incorporates multiple kinds of media. It combines the apparent reality of a photograph with the wild, imaginative creativity of a painting through editing techniques.