Thesis Statements

"William Eggleston's Guide" makes an interesting connection to culture and society through pictures instead of actual words.

"In Plato's Cave" shows you new views on what photography means to other people and photography in a deeper way.

Robert Adams

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Adams_(photographer) :
Robert Adams (born May 8, 1937) is an American photographer who came to prominence as part of the photographic movement known as New Topographics. He was aJohn Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in photography in 1973 and 1980, and he received the MacArthur Foundation's MacArthur Fellowship in 1994. In 2009, he received the Hasselblad Award for his achievements in photography. He is represented by the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco and the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York.
For about five years, beginning in 1974, Adams embarked on an experiment: he made a series of photographs at night—the opposite of the high-altitude daylight used in most of his previous photographs. The project brought an element of risk he had not experienced before. Passing motorists sometimes veered toward him on rural roadsides, and in urban centers police repeatedly questioned him about his activities.

In Plato's Cave summary

While reading "In Plato's Cave", I did struggle to get through it at first.  But one main thing that stuck out to me was on p.8, "Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing - which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and tool of power."  I always thought that photography was just an art. I did not realize that to some people it can be something more meaningful.

Another part that caught me was on p.16 "Like the dead relatives and friends preserved in the family album, whose presence in photographs of neighborhoods now torn down, rural places disfigured and made barren, supply our pocket relation to the past." When I read this part, it made me think about how much has changed over the years. Photographs are like still memories that can be looked back on and remember the good times even if the present isn't what you expected it was going to be.