POST 10: LECTURE – PHOTOGRAPHY AND PRINTED MEDIA

    This lecture is about photography and printed material. The lecture first started off by talking about cave paintings from 40,000 years ago. I find it so fascinating that art was even a thing back then, considering how long ago it was. I never knew that people from all aspects/periods of life use art to communicate with others. The lecture then teaches about the Printing Press, which was a very useful invention as not only newspapers were invented, but media was produced greatly starting with the printing press. As more people got access to newspapers, more people learned to read and write, which grew the boundaries of mass media. The Printing Press lead to other inventions like the Gutenberg printing press, the offset press, and digital printing. Before the printing press was invented, media was difficult to spread, and therefore less people had access to written works, leading to a lack of knowledge on how to read or write.

    The lecture also goes into detail on the history of photography, starting from inventions such as camera obscura and daguerreotype, all the way to photographers figuring out how to capture time in an image. As a film major, using cameras and learning how to use them properly is vital to me. While we have come a very long way since these primal inventions of cameras and photography, I find myself drawn to the beauty and aesthetics of older cameras. It is very interesting to see the process of how all these cameras got developed into something spectacular.