Sontag

  What is your main takeaway from Sontag’s essay?

It seems like Sontag is discussing how photographs of war and hardships can be skewed to fit either side of a war, but no matter what we are utilizing images of suffering in order to justify previous or future actions. There is also some sympathy which is brought out by the photographer through the viewer, but mainly the images are used to rally anger or sadness.

2.  Give at least two smaller takeaways from the essay.  Things that you found 

to be of particular interest.  This can include things that surprised you or provoked 

some thought.

It was really striking when Sontag says "Wars are now also living room sights and sounds." People become desensitized to hardships because they are so commonly televised. The news is constantly running stories of shootings here, bombings there, etc. Younger children are becoming exposed to these hardships and images earlier on in their lives, and eventually you just become numb to it if it seems like the norm.

I also like when she discusses Woolf's statement: "[photographs] are not an argument; they are simply a crude statement of fact..." Photographs and videos are some of the only things (save for photoshopped images) that can be looked and and taken to be true. The argument comes from the subject. Not the photograph itself. Earlier in the essay Sontag talked about a boy killed outside of a Sbarro's in Jerusalem and how each side of the fighting going on their would view the image, despite seeing the exact same image. The truth is a boy died, but either side can take their surrounding truths and apply it to the image. 

3.  Upload an image of pain/suffering to your blog and discuss it.  You can be 

straightforward about this, or you can take a well-known image that you may 

look at differently after reading Sontag.  

I found this image while looking over the My Lai Massacre wiki page which was linked on the blog:

I have seen this image before, but never had context for why or when the image was taken. The first few sentences of the wiki article are horrifying. One of the lesser bad parts of the My Lai Massacre was what happened back home as a result. Americans were already angry about the Vietnam war, and rightfully so. However, many soldiers were over in Vietnam solely to do their duty, and because of these soldiers who decided to rape and pillage Americans were even more distrusting of the few decent soldiers. This image is heartbreaking because the subjects were killed within minutes after the photograph was taken. The woman in the front is fixing up her buttons because she had also just been sexually assaulted, which was rampant during the killings. 

The worst part of the entire article was where they mentioned how a platoon took a lunch break during the killings. The fact that these people could stomach gang raping, defiling, and murdering innocent civilians like the ones pictured above, and then be fine to eat lunch is amazing (in a bad way.)

J-Fashion

This is an image that demonstrates the decora style of fashion, Its trademark is a large amount of accessories and trinkets added to the outfit, mainly in the hair and on the face. The outfits include a great deal of matching, and generally follow a color scheme that harmonizes the chaotic nature of wearing a lot of accessories. One of the most common accessories of this fashion style is bandages, usually placed over the nose.  Decora wearers also place stickers on their faces as sort of mock-freckles, The fashion style is very childlike, but is exclusively worn by adolescents. 

Decora has recently become a large part of the American Lolita community, which is where i got exposure to it (not that I am part of the Lolita community..) This style has always interested me because of the shear mass of colors and textures, but somehow the outfits do not look garish or clashy. In person in Harajuku the outfits are even more colorful and bright, but still maintain the level of cohesion that I enjoy. 

I've also always enjoyed the Fairy Kei fashion style, because it's almost a more toned down way to rep. Lolita fashion. 

These styles are easier to miss on the streets than decora, but still are different than what a Japanese person would usually wear. The style is characterized by pastel colors (where decora is mainly neons and bright colors,) character prints, and flowy, puffy dresses/skirts. The style once again is very childlike, but almost more so than that of the decora style. 

The clothing is very soft and "feminine" (i hate using that term.) This models outfit is so stark against the natural background that she almost looks blurry. The most interesting thing about this clothing style is usually the shoes. They are almost always the chunky bottom mary janes or the pastel colored hightops:

This style has always been interesting to me because I've always loved pastel colors and cute things. I was a tomboy for most of my life, so I never wore dresses or "liked" the color pink. This fashion style has always made me a little jealous, which is probably why i love it so much now. 

Cute things in my life

My bedroom is actually my cutest thing currently. Everything is white, pink, and gold, and i have a lot of stuffed animals and little cute decorations. I'm very into cute things, especially creepy-cute things (which i have none of in my room.) I spent most of my life being anti-cute/anti-pink, but this past year I decided that I wanted to do what I do best and cover my life in cute. I really relate to the part of the Kinsella article when she talked about handwriting. The one student said the characters are hard to read, but look really cute, so she uses them anyway. My room is hard to maneuver now because I'm very messy, but if I mess up my room it's no longer cute. So i rarely ever "use" my room because of wanting the aesthetic.

The cutest item i own is a gudetama head towel I bought at a Sanrio store, also arguably the cutest store I have ever been inside. Sanrio is such a powerhouse in the cute world because of the empire they've built up. It's interesting because the addition of characters to everyday objects makes a consumer more likely to buy the object, despite a hike in price. The towel I bought was about ¥ 2545, while a towel without the character on it would have probably been around ¥1000.


Lolita culture in Japan is interesting to look into, and the Kinsella article sheds some light onto why it was so popular. There are many different "types" of Lolita, ranging from goth to creepy and everything in between. However, there is a base form of Lolita that is simply frills, curly hair, large puffy dresses. Kinsella says that a lot of the cute style in Japan is based on foreign influence, like European. With the dresses in mind, you can see this Victorian influence

Kinsella discusses the shear volume of the love for kawaii culture in early 1990. 71% of people between 18 and 30 reported liking kawaii people, like the group pictured above. There are also toned down versions of cute fashion culture in Japan, such as this ad:

Cute and childlike are very closely related in Japanese culture, but not seen as a bad thing. In American culture (and potentially other western cultures) cuteness is associated with childishness, which is seen as inherently bad. We had talked in class briefly about play and how fucked up public schooling is because of play, and this is actually the reason why. Play is seen as childish in America, while in Japan they seem to let their minds play all throughout adulthood.