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Papers > Art > how has photography been understood as a visual document
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how has photography been understood as a visual document |
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How has the photograph been understood as a visual document? Within this essay I am aiming to discuss the photographic document in terms of the press image amongst newspapers and the media at large, including television. I will trace the history of this genre through that of the war image, charting technological and social changes, including links to censorship and propaganda, explaining the effect this has on the sanitized war images shown. A definition of a document is “an object such as a movie, photograph of audio recording that contains information and can be used as evidence”. ... Following the key date of 1849, photography was becoming an expanding medium and its popularity grew as it amazed people with its ability to render realistic images better than painting. ... The level of ‘truth’ that Victorians held was extremely high, and those at the top of the British Empire were aware of photography’s moral impact. Samuel has noted how high this belief was “Historians, who are normally so pernickety about the evidential status of their documents, are content to take photographs on trust and to treat them as transparent reflections of fact” . The photograph became a powerful way to display the official ‘truth’, and the Crimea war had shown the influence of visual and printed media on domestic attitudes to overseas conflicts . ... As the introduction states on the authenticity of the material “a picture of War, objectively true and faithful to nature, has been photographically recorded for all time…records obtained by the inexorable, incorruptible photographic lens” , illustrates again the trust of a perceived inherent truth that lies within photography. ... The word ‘Primer’ is used in an attempt to educate visual literacy to adults, and make it evident that the press image cannot be trusted. ... His personal opinion of photojournalism, in contradiction to Friedrich, is one which has “contributed practically nothing to the revelation of the truth about the conditions of the world”, but that photography is another controlling institution, which has “become a terrible weapon against truth”. Brecht makes the argument that the sheer numbers of images produced by the press gives the impression that they indeed hold visual evidence, but act “in reality only to obscure the facts” . ... This point is further illustrated as he explains the detrimental effects of photography on the public when it comes to remembering negative events, such as war, that “the floods of photos sweeps away the dams of memory” . ... The image is extremely blurred giving the impression to the viewer, that the original photograph has its authenticity grounded in the appearance that the photographer was inside the action. ... The discussion around ‘War Primer’ illustrates a more political viewpoint when it comes to the effects of photography and the press upon the viewer. ‘War Primer’ itself shows just how important the context of the image is when interpreting its meaning, is it a ‘true’ document of a battle or rather evidence of political loathing. ... Some consider that this system has helped to form a “polite fiction”, where “the reality of war was far dirtier than was apparent to the average…viewer”. ... Freedom of the press should theoretically be encouraged, but the media are failing to criticise the actions of the Allies, that has left the US “elites (able) to manipulate domestic opinion” . ... “Journalism with guts starts with a publisher who has guts…(however) the publisher says, “listen, I’ve got to have circulation, I’ve got to have ratings” . ... Turnley’s thinks that “citizens have a right to see these images” , although he (or his publisher) has still chosen to postpone the material’s release by more than a decade, to a public that is very much against the recent Gulf action. The long delay for ‘true’ photographs to appear shows that little has changed since the release of ‘War Against War’ in 1924. ... An American website named the ‘Memory Hole’ has raised doubts towards the image being a fake, as it says certain members of the crowd have been duplicated. |
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Title: how has photography been understood as a visual document
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