Photography Changes Everything, By Marvin Heiferman

This writing by Marvin Heiferman dives into the topic of photography being unruly and hard to define. He talks about photography being incredibly different to every individual, and how to one person it may mean one thing but to another person it is something very different. He gives the example of the food photographer juxtaposed with a fashion photographer—each uses it differently; the food photographer wants to make food look more fresh, while the fashion photographer is trying to unleash a different sort of “hunger” with his viewer. 

Aside from making this first analysis, Heiferman goes on to talk about that photography really does change everything in human’s life. He says it changes what we want—by influencing how we define our needs, and what we desire. It can change what we see by showing us what the human eye cannot; photography can change perspective and challenges us to question our assumptions of what we think we are actually seeing around us. Photography changes who we are, what we do, where we go, and what we remember. Not many people really pay attention to how important this medium of art is in our daily lives, but it really does shape a big way of how we act as a society. Heiferman does a wonderful job in this work by bringing to attention how photography really does change everything.