At first, I was slightly unsure what the resurrection of photos reading had to do with the myth of Narcissus, but after I thought about it for a while, I sort of understood another point from the resurrection of photos reading about (unrealistic) beauty standards and the pursuit of beauty in society.
I felt like the three readings together were meant to display the sort of danger in being able to edit photos with the goal of making people look better. Of course when the technology of retouching photos was first introduced, it must have been widely embraced as you could get rid of imperfections or add/modify certain features of somebody (as is mentioned in the Photo Resurrection reading), but what this also did, which only became apparent to us in the future, was create a sort of vanity within society that made it chase and yearn for a beauty that wasn’t necessarily possible. Whenever I had heard the Narcissus myth, it was slightly different — the moral of the story was essentially to not love yourself too much. But, these versions had a slightly different moral. It seemed more like they were trying to say that if you obsess over a beauty that you can’t have, it could (literally) be the death of you.
In our society today, awareness of this problem has been raised more and more. It is well-known that advertisements and published photoshoots are heavily edited to increase the beauty of the models in them, but when professional models can’t even achieve certain standards of beauty and are subject to “retouching” in their photos, it becomes apparent that there is a problem. I read an article recently where the main point was essentially that we are in an “Instagram” age and that it is more about the photo and the perception of who we are/were than about the truth. In some sense, it is sad that the truth and the candidness that made photography very different from artforms before it has been lost with the ability to alter photos after they have been taken.
4.341 INTRO TO PHOTOGRAPHY AND RELATED MEDIA 