Issue#1; Photojournalism: To Click or Not To Click?

Dear readers,

Why is a photograph of a dead child so much more upsetting than a dozen articles? They say a picture speaks a thousand words, and photojournalism is a brilliant example of this. In The Power of Photography, the speakers discuss the War Photo Gallery in Dubrovnik: a gallery dedicated to conflict zone photographs only. Here, wars from all over the globe are photographed and displayed for public consumption: to increase awareness. Suffering and pain are so more shocking when seen through images and with an impartial filter. Print/TV news tends to have a political agenda behind it, which can affect the news, compromising impartiality. According to Schriver, “memory for pictures tends to be better than memory for words” (1997).

However, people can also misuse the power of a photograph for their own ends. Take the case of Adnan Hajj, who used photomanipulation to subtly but significantly edit an image he snapped of Beirut after Israel had attacked. This photo caused public outcry, which increased dramatically when the photo was revealed to be a fake.

(Adnan Hajj/Reuters, 2006).

Not only this, but graphic images can lead to compassion fatigue. The ease with which pictures are taken can lead to compassion fatigue, wherein audiences are so numb to images of suffering as the media has become inundated with it. According to Moeller, compassion fatigue is a state of utter habituation to disasters, which "militates both against caring and action" and creates passivity. Do graphic photos of war, famine and turmoil truly educate the public, or do they just add to this overall fatigue?

To conclude, photographs can be used to expose expose poverty, famine, disease. But they are also able to showcase the hardiness of the human spirit, the small victories.

To inspire.

References

• Moeller, S. (1999). Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death. Routledge: New York.
• Schriver, K. A. (1997). ‘Chapter 6: The Interplay of Words and Pictures’, Dynamics in Document Design: Creating Texts for Reader, Wiley Computer Pub: New York.
• The Media Report. (2007). The Power of Photography. Viewed 16 November 2008 from http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2007/2051819.html