What You See Is What You Get - Lecture 5

I’ve always appreciated photography. It’s ability to capture emotions draws me in. So many various feelings can be communicated to the audience, engaging each individual and allowing emotion to brew inside themselves. The power photographs hold is astonishing; however people don’t seem to understand their full potential. As you may have guessed, this week’s lecture was about picture stories and visual media.

We discussed early newspapers and newsletters with line drawings used as visual aids. The evolution of photographs was then taught to us, from the first colour picture in the newspaper to the first video uploaded to the internet (which was highly anticlimactic). Looking at all the amazing images that were being projected on screen, my self-esteem rates were low. I despise psychologists for saying left-handed people are more creative and giving me false hope.

Bruce Redman must be a mind reader, because at that point he provided the class with factors that make a great photo such as framing, focus, angle and point of view, exposure of light, and most importantly timing and capturing ‘the moment’.

To me, ‘the moment’ seemed to be the key aspect in any good photograph. The one moment that captures the raw emotion of a person. When their defences are down and you can see true feelings written all over their faces. I believe THOSE images are what draw in the audience. They engage them, appeal to them.

Now I would like to leave you with my favourite image. I studied this in year 11 photography, but every time I look at the image, regardless of how many times I have looked at it before, fresh, raw emotions flood straight back to me. The photograph is by Phan Thi Kim Phuc and communicates young children fleeing the attack of a napalm bomb that has been dropped in Vietnam in 1972. You can see the pain in their face clearly, both physically and emotionally, a pain that they did not deserve.

Thus, my final statement of the blog post is this: a picture has no meaning at all if it cannot tell a story.