The power of photography

Photo of the first largest camera ever made 1900

 Almost 200 years ago, the only way you could store a memory is either by painting it or describing it on a piece of paper which was so much of a pain and time-waste. However, as you may very well know: Humans invented the camera.This marvelous invention – once seen as magic- resolved a lot of problems in our lives, but it also created new concerns and issues. The very act of visually “capturing” the moment held too much valuable power to the authorities as well as to the normal public. 

 

For the authorities, photography resembled so much power that it was even used by “the governments from Europe, The Soviet Union and America to manipulate the public opinion and change their national sentiment.” (Davenport 152) This may be the consequence of the photo being of supreme description for the people back then; they believed what they saw without hesitation, and comparing with other means of persuasion, visual photos were the most convincing evidence. This brings us to think about a critical question: “Were these photos convincing enough to be held as evidence in courts?” The answer to this question is YES, photographs were oftenly used as a secondary evidence and were accepted by judges everywhere, sometimes it was even accepted as primary evidence (Kenner). This is a result of the fact that photographs were not easily manipulated at that time -before the introduction of digital photography and computer-aided-photo-editing-.  Nowadays, as photography became so popular and photo-editing have become an amateur job that doesn’t need any prerequisite knowledge, photographs are not much accepted as they used to be. More details about photos being used as evidence may be found at Photographs as Evidence by Meskin and Cohen. However, the power of the photo related to authorities isn’t only related to evidence; governments exploited the advancements of technology to use photography for surveillance purposes which raised a lot of privacy concerns and human-rights issues. In fact, this happened so recently when the NSA was discovered to run a project called “OPTIC NERVE” that collected photos and information from the Yahoo network users’ webcams. (The Guardian) Almost 1. 8m users targeted by UK agency in six-month period alone which is a complete violation of privacy rights. Governments usually do these violations to control their people and very often we can see people rising up against that, but can photography help in these uprisings? Can just taking a photo have the power to change the world?!

Turkish officer holding Aylan Kurdi's body (The Telegraph)

 Photos were found to be of much power to change the world, indeed. Some photos revealed crises and violations happening to people which incited a lot of revolutions against corrupt systems and authorities, like what happened in the Egyptian revolution after Khaled Saeed's photo or how Aylan Kurdi's photo at the shores of Turkey deepened the Europe's migrant and refugee crisis. (The Telegraph) Another example of power the photograph gives to the people is that it satisfies voyeurism.Facilitated and encouraged by the camera, voyeurism and surveillance provoke uneasy questions about who is looking at whom, whether for power or for pleasure. Voyeurism has long been acknowledged as an essential aspect of photography and represents its most common use. (SFMOMA)

The photograph is powerful, the photograph is beautiful, but it's also an art that can only show what the artist wants; we should appreciate its power, but we have to analyze what's presented to us before we make any judgement or decision, because even photos that were once true can now be deceiving.