Week 8

Back in the 19th century photography was just catching on and the things people took pictures of had to be important. People back then thought that something had to mean something or be very important for you to take a picture of it. This is difficult to think of because today not only is there highly precise cameras that can take a picture to the millisecond but we also have more portable cameras right in our cell phones. Phones have progressed to much that you can take pictures to the second and you can edit them. People now make art out of photos, a lot of which are to make statements which also goes back to a form of caricature. Along with the excitement of the camera being made there was also a fascination when the ability of being able to take a panoramic picture came along. However we’ve come a long way since then and now we can easily take a panoramic with our phones without having to wait at all.

In the 19th century there was a large movement/march for women's rights held in New York. This has recently become more prominent in the news and is still a huge issue especially with the recent inauguration of president Donald Trump. During his campaign there was a huge scandal when Trump exploited a women by saying he grabbed her p****y.  This womanizer behavior caused an uproar that lead to a women’s rights march January 21 of this year. Even looking back at how art was portrayed then and now you can see that women are made out to be looked at as objects of a sexual nature. We see patterns of this through centuries earlier on where there is paintings of nude women all the way to the nude photography there is now. This is all part of society's influence on making women into sexual objects.

Moving on to caricatures, they are cartoon that hold an underlying message. They used to be used in papers to make statements about corrupt social figures such as politicians, judges, lawyers, doctors, businessmen, actors, and even went as far as the king. This went so far that France decided to pass a law in 1835 to limit the freedom of press to only being able to express opinions verbally rather than through pictures. Relating it to now, we still have political cartoons in the newspaper that make statements about important figures and gives writers a chance to express their personal opinions and gives readers the opportunity to comprehend the picture in their own words and figure it out. However since social media has been much more prevalent in our society today, people have found their own unique way of expressing their opinions about popular figures today. They create pictures with sarcastic sayings on them meant to be funny, people then see this and share or retweet and it eventually goes viral and circulates through the web. This is society’s new way of creating caricatures.