In Platos Cave

 "Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out." 

I think that this is an interesting point because it explains how a photo seldom stands alone. A photo is usually edited in some way before being presented to the world. Photographs tend to care more about whether or not their audience is pleased with the image than the integrity of the image itself. I think that in a lot of cases an unedited image can be very powerful, even if it isn't the most appealing to an audience. I think that photographers should take more time to consider whether or not it's a good idea to edit a photo. Plenty of photos could stand alone without the editing. I understand if there's a technical issue with the image, or if the image would look better with more saturation, but for most photos the appeal is in the illusion of honesty. 

"Thus, photography develops in tandem with one of the most characteristic of modern activities: tourism. For the first time in history, large numbers of people regularly travel out of their habitual environments for short periods of time."

I find this quote to be interesting because I never considered the effect that photography had on tourism. I think it's interesting that one form of art can influence people to spend large amounts of money to travel somewhere. I do understand it though. People see a bright, pretty, place and think "I want to be there." I just never considered that where people vacation and spend their time could be so heavily influenced by photography. I do also think it makes sense that tourism grew in tandem with photography. The unknown scares people, so when they got to see what all of these places looked like, they were willing to drop the money on going in person. 

"Thus, in the bureaucratic cataloguing of the world, many important documents are not valid unless they have, affixed to them, a photograph-token of the citizen’s face."

Another thing I hadn't considered before is how photography has become a tool to catalog the world. Photos have become such an important form of identification that they are ingrained into everyday necessities. It's even gotten to the point where technology-such as phones can identify us by our faces. I think because I was born in 2000 I never experienced a world that wasn't ruled by photo identification. I honestly can't imagine it. Photos are on drivers licenses, social media pages--which work as sort of diaries now a days with how people post their feelings and achievements on them, and any other place where self identification is. Photos are used on the news if a person is missing or in trouble with the law. Everyone has photos of themselves on hand. It's strange to think that self-identification could mean something other than a photograph.