Responding to Ritchin [Chapter 7]

I enjoyed reading about “The Social Photograph”. I think that the beginning quote sums up part of my thought on photography in that I do not care where a photograph falls (art, documentary, journalism, commercialism) so much as I care about what it says to/about society. It is just like language and text. In the realm of the written word science, fiction, politics, religion, etc, are composed. All have very different purposes, yet are all written/recorded through the use of language/text. Photography too can be used one day as a documenter, the next as a writer of fiction. I think that is okay so long as we view photographs with an open mind and try to understand what we are looking at, how it was made, and the purpose behind the image.

I believe that photography can be (and has been, as Ritchin demonstrates) an incredible tool in bringing social situations to light. I think that what Ritchin demonstrates well in this chapter is the complex nature of actually shooting, sharing, and receiving photographic images of social issues. When it comes to the photographer, how do we trust his/her intent, view, that the scene was found and not composed, that the story recorded in captions are accurate? When it comes to the sharing/publication/distribution of imagery how do we trust that an image in view is original and is not a reproduction/enhanced version of the original? How do we trust authenticity? Again, how do we trust the story/captions that accompany the image? Finally, when it comes to us (the viewer) how do we trust our own reading of the image? How do we know that our own views of the world will not interfere and cloud our vision of what has been presented to us?

I believe that the internet too is as complex in nature as photography. It is hard to always know where the information presented on our screen falls in terms of fiction, truth, altered truth. When the internet and photography combine and together pump out more bits, bytes, and imagery than we can handle (which it does) then we begin to filter out the overload. Sometimes we mean to, sometimes we cannot help it. As I read I do keep coming back to the idea of hypertext. I believe that as negatively as we may view combining photographic imagery and hypertext we cannot escape that reality, and in fact we already live there. (Cyber) physically linked or not, definitions, captions, and personal viewer recounts and interpretations will be applied upon an online image. We will grasp a single word within the caption or webpage, or the photographer’s name, or the geographic location, and will continue searching for additional information to either further understand that specific photograph or to add to our knowledge of the world at large (inspired by the image). Either way, everything that we learn after that image will in some way refer back to it. We are already always applying information that the author did not specifically intend.