Can photography be considered as a useful idiot?

Dali · Sep 3, 2015

Everyone knows what is happening in Europe with these terrible migrations of thousands of people from Africa and Middle East. At the european level, things seems to speed up since pictures of refugee bodies driven ashore in Turkey were recently released.

After the fact, the question: Are these pictures going to be an instrument in the hands of the so-called western democraties to justify their actions to pretend to fix the mess they created in Middle East and Africa? Said differently, is in general photography cursed to serve interests it tries to speak out against by emphasizing the emotional aspect of any event and to orient the public attention toward well understood political interests?

Ko.Fe. · Sep 3, 2015

Pictures are taken to show cruel reality since first Crimea War.

blansky · Sep 3, 2015

I'd guess that due to the power of the visual media, it can and always has been used by everyone to further various causes, good and bad.

The cause and effect of every decision we and governments make reverberates out. Always has.

Only with mass communication now there is no where to hide or hide it.

pdeeh · Sep 3, 2015

I'm not sure what the question is, but if it is something like "Will powerful self-interested groups co-opt any media they can lay their hands on to justify and aggrandise themselves?", the answer seems rather obvious ...

BrianShaw · Sep 3, 2015

Dali said:
... Said differently, is in general photography cursed to serve interests it tries to speak out against by emphasizing the emotional aspect of any event and to orient the public attention toward well understood political interests?

Letters are similarly "cursed" when formed into words. So what?

BrianShaw · Sep 3, 2015

blansky said:
...

Only with mass communication now there is no where to hide or hide it.

Even mass communication is as old as the hills. Its just faster now.

Jim Jones · Sep 3, 2015

Photography is not a useful idiot, but even idiots can produce useful photographs.

gone · Sep 3, 2015

Well, I can certainly be an idiot at times (and how often those times come up depends on who you ask :{

Yet I still can be useful. So, sure.

chrisaisenbrey · Sep 3, 2015

If you follow the news in Europe the recent picture of the little dead boy at the Turkish beach is unfortunately just one picture in a long row. I wonder why exactly this picture made it into the US news.

Last week the pictures of a truck standing at the side of an Austrian motorway dominated the news. Actually there was nothing else to see than a truck with ads for chicken meat on it. But the knowledge that it was filled with dead refugees and a little imagination made it to a horror picture.

Dali · Sep 3, 2015

chrisaisenbrey said:
If you follow the news in Europe the recent picture of the little dead boy at the Turkish beach is unfortunately just one picture in a long row. I wonder why exactly this picture made it into the US news.

Last week the pictures of a truck standing at the side of an Austrian motorway dominated the news. Actually there was nothing else to see than a truck with ads for chicken meat on it. But the knowledge that it was filled with dead refugees and a little imagination made it to a horror picture.

I am more interested in foreign news than U.S. news. I don't care about Donald Trump's last rant or baseball stories...

To answer to a previous post... Yes, I make a difference between a writer and a photographer. A writer can't deny what he wrote or pretend we was not understood. What is written is written. With a picture, I am not sure the original intention of the photographer will be the remaining one in everyone's head after it is recycled by mainstream media and the political staff... You can depict horror but if the only tangible result if to fuel political careers and nonsense, I guess you would be disappointed.

blansky · Sep 3, 2015

BrianShaw said:
Even mass communication is as old as the hills. Its just faster now.

Of course. But with push notification, Twitter, Facebook, 1000 "media" outlets, that mass communication pretty much gets to everyone, and very often with a point of view.

Can photography be considered as a useful idiot?

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