What is your reaction when viewing a picture for the first time?
i don't look at something for 3 seconds ...
i have a background in art and architecture and art+architectural history
as well as the sciences so i look at something from a handful of perspectives
even if i don't like it i will still look at, maybe even more than if i like it .. like being a gut feeling ...
its all about what baggage you bring to the viewing. i'm not a big fan of brady's civil war dead
not because they are bad photographs, or he might have positioned them to "look better / more painterly"
but because it brings back memories of a day i looked at the images for hours for a class
and then a couple of hours later, for 3 hours i heard oral histories and personal accounts and photographs of a genocide ...
and then a few hours later for about 2 hours i looked at jeffrey silverthorne's series he took at morgues of people who had died of unknown causes ...
it was a bit overwhelming and still 30+ years later i don't really want to look at brady's work or much of anything that
is in your face with dead bodies ...