“Blossom Queen” arrival from Seattle, March 27, 1954
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This photograph, “Blossom Queen,” shows a woman who has just arrived at the LA airport from Seattle in 1954.
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2020-11-25T11:44:52-08:00
This photograph, “Blossom Queen,” shows a woman who has just arrived at the LA airport from Seattle in 1954. Her appearance and confident posture, as well as the fact that she can afford traveling by plane, allude to her social standing. According to Gisèle Freund, photography is generally accepted and utilized by every social class, which may distinguish photography from previous forms of artistic expression. In any photograph, specific characteristics and details will certainly give indications as to the dominant social class that is expressed in the image. Any given photograph depicts and interprets events from the viewpoint of a specific social class. In “Blossom Queen” it appears at first glance; the subject is wealthy, and the photograph was taken in a socially desirable environment.
Photography is often cherished for its accurate and unbiased representation of external reality and its assurance of objectivity and authenticity for a given moment in time. With photography becoming an everyday practice, however, this thesis may be questioned. Through the woman's awareness of the picture being taken and her intentional modification of her behavior, the very distinct moment in reality of her leaving the airplane has been recreated in a new manner. The theory of photography is extended by another layer which includes the manipulation of a given moment and the addition of imagination and subjectivity to a photograph. As Freund discusses in the early chapters of her book [1], photography remains to have “only illusory objectivity.” The intentional modifications have become a major component of photography as an everyday social practice.
