English 104
In your introduction:
Describe your own history with taking and viewing photographs. You can include when and why you starting taking photos as well as what your photos are generally of. Also include what kind of photographs you like to look at (besides your own) and why. The last sentence of your introduction should be your thesis.
In your thesis (last sentence of introduction):
Which 2 of the following ideas from Susan Sontag’s On Photography do your personal experiences viewing and taking photographs support?
(In your thesis make sure to avoid plagiarizing Dr. Kwa’s writing by summarizing these Sontag ideas in your own words.)
- Photographs are not mere reflections of reality. Photographs, with their widespread penetration into world cultures, reveal and determine biases in our perceptions of reality.
- Photographs can have negative effects when the viewer assumes her or his interpretation of what the photograph means is revealing a universal truth instead of merely one possible interpretation out of many possible meanings.
- Photographs can demoralize and even reduce a viewer’s empathy for the subject in the photo when the photograph has too much shock value or there are too many shocking photos of that same subject.
In your two body paragraphs, make sure to
- Provide quotations from Sontag’s “In Plato’s Cave” (from On Photography)
- Provide your own personal examples to illustrate Sontag’s abstract concepts. Make your personal examples like mini-stories with details such as names of characters, dialogue, setting, actions etc.
- Each body paragraph should discussion one idea that supports the thesis; in other words, body paragraphs should not repeat ideas from previous paragraphs and should not contain more than one main idea.
- Make sure to follow up all quotations with a 4-5 sentence explanation of how they support your topic sentence claim.