Photography Essay

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Photography Essay

            Journalism is the way in which people communicate important, true stories to each other even across large distances, both cultural and geographic. In recent years, journalism has been taken to a new level, as people can communicate with each other so much faster. People are connecting to each other on a much broader, faster level, and as a result people have become more tuned in to what happens I the world, but at the same time they have become more detached. As we hear more and more about the atrocities and abominations of human rights committed daily, we come to view it as less real and tangible to us, and so as people we need something that makes the people in these situations more real, and not just a news story. Photography shows us what’s happening. It takes a news story from being just a written description of something or a reporter talking to something we can see, and therefore something we can connect to. In an age where people are becoming more aware of what’s happening in the world, but at the same time more detached, photography provides a human link.

            As one photographer once said, “the camera isn’t a defense against what you’re seeing because you’re looking through it”. This quote is so vital to understanding the purpose of photography because it’s not just the photographer that’s looking through the lens; it’s the view of the photograph too. The viewer is seeing what the lens sees, and to a certain extent is feeling what the photographer is feeling. For the photographer, they’re showing people something worth seeing, and for the viewer they are seeing a story, condensed into one instant. Good photographs show more than just that instant. That relationship between photographer and viewer is the underlining use for photography: to communicate in a more real way.

            Creating a photojournalism essay provides new insight into what photography does, because it takes more into account the purpose of the photographer. No matter what it is that you’re taking pictures of, you’re forced to think about your subject in a new way. You have to think what view photos capture the essence of your subject, in a way that gives a more three-dimensional story of something. If the subject is music, then what is it that you want to communicate about music? Once that’s decided, you must think about how to represent that something, and how it looks to you and how you what to show it. It’s sort of reminiscent of writing a poem, just only with pictures. In fact, it’s almost exactly like poetry because you have to find a theme, find the image in the theme, and then find deeper meaning, maybe even metaphor or other literary terms in that image. Taking a photo is like writing a poem because they both intend to tell a story in a relatively short period of time. Just one glace/reading, and it communicates an image. That’s the insight that can be gained from taking photographs of your own.