A photograph, after developing for hundreds of years, has now reached a stage where a person could shake the world with just a simple ‘click’ from its camera. Used as prosthetic memory, evidence and art, a picture from a photographer could served different purposes and create different meanings (Wells, 1997). Why, ‘an image can serve a multitude of purposes, appear in a range of settings, and mean different things to different people’ (Sturken and Cartwright, 2009, page 9).
As a prosthetic memory, pictures could ‘remember’ things for us and even in more great detail. Though, it is debated that while pictures might recorded everything that human memory could not bother remembering, pictures could not ‘capture’ the emotion or atmosphere of the scene getting photographed on, which is perhaps why Vincent van Gogh had decided to draw a portrait of his mother after feeling dissatisfied seeing a photograph of his mother (Batchen, 2004, page 6).
Modernism favours photographs, taking them as the ‘universal’ or ‘absolute’ truth. Being in an era of growing scientific interests, the photographs are used as tools of documentations and to provide evidence and for some, to record history as it is. However, as photographs could not escaped from being subjective, postmodernism argues that photographs could not be taken as ‘universal truth’ as the author – or in this case, photographer – is ‘dead’ (Lombardo, 2010) and hence could invite several different meanings, according to the interpreters’ knowledge and standing.
Nowadays, photographs are also commonly used for cultural critique (Wright, 1999, page 135). Whatever Vincent van Gogh may say, one could not argue that photograph is useful to tell people of what one wants to say or show as a visual evidence of something is usually proven even more powerful than just a spoken account of the same thing.
For example, this picture below:
First look, it may look like an ordinary landslide. But what if a title is added to the picture saying, “The cemetery after the heavy rainfall”? Most may raise their eyebrows thinking what happens to those resting souls who are unfortunate enough to be caught in the landslide? Are they going to be returned to their rightful place…if one manages to differentiate them from gravels, soils and their bones?
People would then think that if something has been done sooner, this unfortunate event would not happen, especially in a place where tradition runs deep within the core of its society. Hence, this picture could be said as a cultural critique of the lack of care for environment, more ever in this era where almost every place are now concerned with how the Mother Earth is treated and how this would affects people’s lives. If even the resting ground for those who have departed could not escape from the claws of natural disasters, what are the chances of living people could sit in idle without having a risk of getting caught with the global phenomena?
Simple it may be, but the picture above could relate a message so important to the world. And there are hundreds and thousands of pictures out there that have done so, such as Dorothea Lange’s ‘The Migrant Mother’, Malcolm Browne’s ‘Self-Immolation’ and Kevin Cartner’s Pulitzer-prize winning photograph of a Sudanese girl who was crawling towards a feeding centre with a vulture watching her every move from behind .
As a conclusion, photograph may not be able to capture the sensation of the captured scene and may possesses several different meanings, but it would not be ‘silenced’ – it would have its own voice, telling a story that perhaps could change the world’s fate.
References:
§ Batchen, G. (2004). Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (pages 6 – 16). New York : Princeton Architectural Press. Retrieved June 20, 2010 from UBD Ebrary Website.
§ Lombardo, P. (2010). The Three Paradoxes of Roland Barthes. University of Georgiana Press
§ Sturken, M. and Cartwright, L. (2009). Image, Power and Politics. Practice of Looking: And Introduction to Visual Culture (page 9 – 47). Oxford : Oxford University
§ Wells, L. (1997). Thinking About Photography (page 24 – 54). Photography: A Critical Introduction. London
§ Wright, T. (1999). Photography as a Cultural Critique (page 135 – 151). Photography Handbook. London and New York
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