Francisco Goya's etchings The Disasters of War vs Civil War photographs by Mathew Brady
The first thing that comes to mind when looking at these two sets of images are that the one if the fiction of someones imagination and the other is a true representation of a real event. Even though both are real the viewer has more empathy with the photos than with the etchings, the people are real, so you feel something towards them whereas the etchings are just representations of people.
"photographs are inevitably colored by the photographer's personal interests, attitudes, and prejudices.' " I feel that viewers see this in etching but not in photographs, we want to believe that the photos are real and that they are objective.
"Photographs are transparent. We see the world through them." This is the line that sums up the piece the best for me. When viewing photos we are not looking at the truth but we are looking at those images and adding our own experiences, wants, needs, views. By doing so we attach meaning and emotion to those images which makes them more real than what they may seem. As Walton says, photography is not more real than a painting or a sketch of the same object but due to the detail and what we want to look at in that image we interpret the photo as the one that is real and the other as objects of someones imagination.
After reading the piece I must say I never even tried to compare images and paintings and thinking about how I interpret different mediums. In the future I will be aware of it.