Popular Culture Review 31.2
we try to sketch an image of our history on a certain theme ( be it a personal history or a collective ), we select pictures that best suit our exotic idea of that theme . Sontag builds on Walter Benjamin ’ s thesis that we are drawn to the temporary and declares that photographers tend to take pictures of things that they know are about to disappear ( e . g ., landscapes , endangered rural traditions , and family moments ). Photographers thus tend to create pictures of oddities and temporary phenomena ; we , much later , will select pictures that generate the most distance from us , the ones that make us feel melancholic , to re-create the past . Sontag ( 59-62 ) states that this makes our look at the past subjective and only partly correct , since we only focus on things that are gone and not on the numerous things that remain and are continuous .
The essay concludes that the Melancholy Object is a detached moment from history . The picture focuses on one precise moment that we�because we focus on the distance / melancholy of it�start to detach from a greater timeline and appreciate due to the oddity and uniqueness it depicts . “ Life is not about significant details , illuminated by a flash , fixed forever . Photographs are ” ( Sontag 63-64 ). It is precisely this “ detaching ” that is also an integral part of nostalgia .
Merriam-Webster defines nostalgia as “ a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition ” (“ Nostalgia ”). It is a feeling that springs forward from a melancholic distance with a certain moment or object . It is a way to mentally and emotionally escape the here-and-now , and it can be triggered by Melancholy Objects . But we need to understand that the place we escape to is , just as the Melancholy Objects , part of a personal and glossed historical view . As Parsons says ( to describe Sontag ’ s sentiments ): “ Rather than leading to any sort of specific or moral knowledge , historical photographs affect us
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