Concepts Revisited

Current Mood: lonely
Current Music: "Somebody Get Me A Doctor" by Van Halen

This is an update of a series of blog posts about concepts that I love. Here we go.

Recently, I found a bit of text in a book I am reading called The Engines of Our Ingenuity by John Lienhard, about the evolution of technologies and the connection with culture. It mentions an example of social commentary, a previous Concept That I Love.

Photography turned to documentary reporting- the joining of the two ends of the transcontinental railway, an absolutely radiant young Sarah Bernhardt, a wild-eyed Baudelaire. And another thread appears. We see rotting corpses of Civil war dead and child laborers in factories. We see the urban poor. By the 1860s photography had become social commentary and a self-conscious historical record. Photography began as an unsolved technical problem, a teaser of the imagination. In just thirty years the ability to record images had turned into an extension of our conscience.