I notice that when reading this image, you are, in a sense, ‘reading the mood’ of the image. You read what is happening vs. how it makes you feel and derive a story that builds the picture. Once you have all of that information, your brain can begin to try and piece things together based on past lessons and experiences you have been through. If I have seen someone happy at the idea of receiving a gift, and see an image of two people, one holding a box and smiling, then I can connect the dots and say that the image is of someone receiving a gift.
When it comes to Hoepker’s image, the first thing that I noticed was the smoke in the background coming up from the buildings and going across the top of the image. Then I noticed the buildings in the background, being able to identify the area as a city of some sort. After that, I notice the bicycle leaning up against the stone wall, and the people sitting in a circle talking to each other in the foreground. The trees on either side of the group of people and image then caught my attention, and how light and bright the colors are even though some sort of disaster is occurring in the background behind them. Finally I noticed how far away the people are from the city and said disaster.
I believe that the opinion posed by this image and artist is that people don’t notice things unless it is happening right in front of them. I get this due to how far they are from the smoke, as well as how they are not paying attention to it. Even though the accident is taking place, the colors are still bright and cheerful as if to even out or take away from the disaster in the background. The image itself was taken by Thomas Hoepker on 9/11 when the two twin towers were hit as he passed by a group of people lounging on a boardwalk. Plato was concerned that artists and images are removed from the truth in a way to deceive uneducated people, I believe that Hoepker’s image in this particular instance supports this idea.
The image is blurry and makes it hard to see the peoples faces and thus their reactions to what is going on in the background. Hoepker stated in his article that the identified people sitting on the wall were really in shock, however the image did not actually catch that and does not show the real emotion behind the people. While I do not believe that it was his intention to deceive any uneducated people, it still paints Americans in the wrong light when it comes to that attack. I believe that if Hoepker took multiple pictures in order to get the true emotions that were showing on their faces, or if he talked to them immediately after in order to get their own statement to go along with the picture. Instead, he put the image with a description stating that it shows how Americans can already move on from a traumatic occurrence in almost a blink of an eye, which is not true.
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