How Does Photography Portray Truth?

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Recommended: Relationship between truth and photography

Chapter 4: Images and Truth representation
4.1 History of manipulation
Photography was recognized as the perfect documentary medium because the mechanical nature of the medium when it was first introduced approximately 150 years ago, because it ensured unadulterated, exact replicas of the subject matter. The technological advances of cameras and the subsequent development of photojournalism led to clearer, more realistic photos. With a lighter, transportable camera, photojournalists can now take unrehearsed snapshots of the exact moment unlike the stiff poses we have seen before captured by early, long-exposure cameras back then. Photo told the truth by exposing people in an unrehearsed and candid manner. Photography has become a proof of recorded …show more content…

the story that a piece of photograph tells is usually not the accurate truth that occurred on the event itself, photographs were stories that has been cleverly dissected and put together again according to the will and intention of the photographer. Aspect of reality were just a matter of story that the photographer wanted to represent for certain publications. No matter how precise a photographer tries to capture the scene, the essence of the scene before him might be missed out. In this case, in order to represent the scene or subject to be as accurate as possible, manipulation would be seen as something NECESSARY to be done. Not to mention how important a caption of a picture is, as events are often not seem clear and self-explanatory in photographs, without a caption, stories told from photographs could become decidedly ambiguous. The ironic part is, in order to represent the scene as faithfully as possible, a photographer may be compelled to manipulate a picture instead of using the straight out of camera ones, not to mention personal opinion sometimes plays a part in depicting …show more content…

Journalists were trusted to give life relevant objective information, As journalists are seen as “news specialists”, we have strong faith in the truthfulness of the information they broadcasts
News and documentary narratives are not necessarily all in spoken or written form. Most news and documentary formats are heavily dependent on both still and live-action photography. The pictures form a narrative that is sometimes more compelling than speech or the written word. News and documentary photography effectively record the texture of current experience, and invest that experience with meaning. Photographs, as stated earlier, are symbolic narratives. But in order for these symbolic narratives to remain effective, the photographs must remain current.
[From: Truth in Photography - Perception, Myth and Reality in the postmodern

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