Cotton Chapter 1 If this is Art

Within Cotton's Chapter 1, many of the photographers have moved from a point and shoot to images they were taking were thought about and created by the photographer.  She says, "artistic creation begins long before the camera is actually held in position and an image fixed, starting with the planning of the idea" (21).  This chapter focuses on the "planning of the idea", like what we are doing for our next project.  WE are thinking out what we want to do for our self portrait portrait project.  We arent just going to take meaningless images but we are thinking out and planning what we want to do and how we want to portray emotions and other things.
Performance started to play roles in photos.  Photographers started to stage their subjects so that they could convey a certain political or social meaning.  I think The Blob 4 is an image that impacts me a lot.  I don't want to stop looking at it.  The image isn't just about what it is showing in the image but instead it gives off this uncomfortable feeling to the viewer. "The blob embodies the embarrassment and vulnerability of human physicality" (27).  I think this is extremely true especially for women and how they are always concerned with how they look or how they are perceived.  With Erwin Wurm he thought of the image as the idea.
To close out the chapter Cotton ends with talking about repetition of images.  I especially liked Roni Horn's You are the Weather image because of the small game that you get to play by making up her emotions with every image even though most of the images are the same.  So the viewer has control of what is being portrayed in the images.