Can one photo change a life?

Yes, one photo can change life.

Example: There is one photograph, which contains in lower right corner, sharp foreground image of African boy who is duying of hunger. In upper left corner on background is image of voulpter (is this right expression for bird which eat dead bodies of animals and humans...), blurred, which looks like waiting for boy to die and to eat boys body. Famous photograph. Well, when photographer showed that photograph to "civilized world" people started to ask questions like "did you feed the boy or you just take picture and passed buy" and like. After while, photographer who couldn't stand pressure, made suicide. He was 33 years old if I remember well. And I think he was Magnum photographer at that time.

So, yes, one photograph can change life. Of photographer and person(s) which is (are) photographed.

BradS said:

What the title says.

Can one photo have so significant an effect that it might justifiably be called "life changing"?

Examples?

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per the original comment. personally I think it can be "life changing" ....
I read an article in View Camera and saw this image.
(courtesy of Michael Mutmanskys' website)
Dead Link Removed

that image was life changing for me personally. hadnt done anything larger than 6x6 MF and it inspired me to attempt 4x5 and eventually (and presently) 7x17.

so life changing I would deem it. since it now takes up so darn much of my life/time/money.

when i was in college, i studied art + art history
and wrote a 30 page paper piet mondrain.
somehow, while doing the research i came upon the work
of laszlo maholy-nagy, i found one of the photograms that pretty much changed the way i thought about photography.

http://www.geh.org/fm/amico99/htmlsrc2/m198121630071_ful.html#topofimage

until then, a photograph had to be of something that was recorded with a camera, and a photogram was just something you did in your first photo-class when you emptied your pockets ( pebbles, lint, paperclips, pennies, good luck charms, frogs and everything else ) ... and got the outline of it all.

the way mahloy-nagy used photo paper, objects and light to paint a 3-d image pretty much changed everything.

(if you every want to see his "light prop" and the film he made from it "black white and gray" go to the fogg museum at harvard university. they have one of the 3 props, and the film that (at least they used to ) plug-in and show on a weekly basis. well worth it if you are into 30s abstract imagery.)

Marc Riboud

I went to a Marc Riboud's photo exhibit yesterday in Kyoto. I missed the chance to see him in person at the opening a few weeks ago, but I'm glad I saw his original prints in a show.

One of his famous photogpraphs is the one with a woman named Jane holding a little flower in front of the line of police guards during the anti-war protest back in the 60's. It's a beautiful photograph, I think.

However, I recall similar events in some of the protests I attended between 2000 and 2002 in the U.S. where some photographers (seemingly professionals) tried to stage this for their own shots . I remember clearly when one photographer paid a young female protester a few bucks and gave her a flower to hold it in front of the police just like Reboud's photograph during the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in 2000. This was all done in front of us in a large crowd of people, and we're booing him for doing that because that's immoral (and so lame). But it seemed that was apparently a kind of fashion for some photographers to manipulate, so they didn't stop.

So, that's my take on this topic. Yes, one photograph changes people's lives and it's sometimes rather obsessive.

laz said:

No! The South Vietnamese was being executed by the Viet Cong! NOT AN AMERICAN!

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Actually, it was a South Vietnamese Colonel (General?) who was executing a suspected VC.

Another one of those life-altering photos from the Vietnam conflict was Nick Utt's photo of Kim Phuc running down the street with her skin falling off from the napalm burns.