The Philosophy of Photography with Amir Zaki on Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #61

Amir Zaki teach­es at UC-River­side and has had his work dis­played in numer­ous gal­leries, in his recent book Cal­i­for­nia Con­crete: A Land­scape of Skateparks, and pro­filed via a short film.

Amir joins your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt to con­sid­er this com­mon act that can stretch from the mun­dane to the sub­lime. How have our var­i­ous pur­pos­es for pho­tog­ra­phy changed with the advent of dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy, the intro­duc­tion of social media, and the ready access to video? What deter­mines what we choose to take pic­tures of, and how does tak­ing pho­tog­ra­phy more seri­ous­ly change the way we expe­ri­ence? We touch on icon­ic and ide­al­ized images, cap­tur­ing the spe­cif­ic vs. the uni­ver­sal, wit­ness­ing vs. inter­ven­ing via pho­tog­ra­phy, and more.

See more of Amir’s work at amirzaki.net.

A few of the arti­cles we looked at to pre­pare includ­ed:

• “Pho­tog­ra­phy as Pop­u­lar Cul­ture” by Jonathan Green
• “Intro­duc­tion to Pho­tog­ra­phy: The Uni­ver­sal Lan­guage” by Spencer Cox
• “Ama­teur Vs. Pro: How Dif­fer­ent­ly The Same ‘Ugly’ Loca­tion Looks When You Become A Pro­fes­sion­al Pho­tog­ra­ph­er” by Phillip Haumess­er
• “15 Leg­endary Pho­tog­ra­phers You Should Know” by Marky Ramone Go
• “35 Pow­er­ful Pho­tos that Tell a Sto­ry” from Jot­Form
• “WWI­I’s Most Icon­ic Kiss Was­n’t Roman­tic — It Was Ter­ri­fy­ing” by Brooke L. Blow­er
• “You’ll Nev­er See the Icon­ic Pho­to of the ‘Afghan Girl’ the Same Way Again” by Rib­hu

Learn more at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can only hear by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Fol­low Amir on Insta­gram @amir_zaki_.

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