Tuesday, July 13, 2010
The Truth in Photos.
In Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, he brings up how photography can either be true or false. If it's true you can't argue with the photograph, and he makes a very good point. Photographs are captured in less then a second, and no other person would be able to catch that precise moment. But, because technology has improved so much, you can now purchase a program for the computer to edit photos, and you can transform a photograph completely, making it go from true to false in just a couple of minutes. Like Postman argues, television is just a moving picture and is mostly false; writing may also be false, so all we could really trust are the photographs. But, how can we now a photograph is false, when we have programs to change it to make it look better?
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This is very true. Just look at the fashion industry. It is the best example of it. They are supposed to portray what is beautiful; however, all the time these photos are altered. There are tons of videos on youtube that prove this. This one for example. They take a normal, average looking girl and turn her into something "advertisement appropriate."
ReplyDeleteThe very first video on your link Carina, inspired one of my posts right on point. We can trust photos but not all of them. Photos online and magazine are bound to be touched up in every way possible.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't agree more, Kimberly. Photographs used to be the only thing we could use to actually prove something. However, there are some situations we can still trust, but to a certain extent. For example, a person may take a picture at the beach but they thought that they looked too pale, so they darkened themselves up a bit in photoshop. Someone else looking at this photo could analyze it and start to ask a bunch of questions. "Wow. She edited her face so did she edit in the background of sand and water too?" Yes, it's true that we can't trust photographs anymore, but I still say that it's more trustworthy to me than television or writing. You have to work with what you have.
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