Cotton Chapter 7: Revived and Remade

Within Cotton's chapter 7 she talks about how photographs can be a process of signification and cultural coding.  Like in Susan Sontag's article on photography, Cotton brings up that many of the photos in the chapter are images that must have past experiences or personal knowledge brought in by the viewer to fully understand the image.  But the images can never be understood in the same way that the photographer meant them to be, due to everyone else's opinions and personal experiences.  Cotton talks a lot about how Cindy Sherman, a postmodernist photographer, created the viewer's experience in her images.  I personally thought Gillian Wearing's photo was really interesting.  She would wear prosthetic masks and leave one spot that would give it up that she was wearing a mask.  I think masks are something that are very ambiguous.  They can hide things about an image but also reveal an uncomfortable truth.