Reading Response #3: (Ritchin Ch.5)

This reading really enlightened me to the fact that politics really are a spectacle for journalistic photographers. Some of the most famous photographs have been political photographs, and they're ones that stick in people's minds, forever. Photographs of war are so publicized, and when people are looking for news, they're usually obsessed with the photographs of the news. Photographs are one of the only ones to document events in their visual formats and because our society is very attracted to tragedy, photographs become popular. When September 11th happened, photographs and videos were some of the first things to become publicized and I remember even sitting in my house and looking at my mom with the newspaper photographs on the kitchen table and watching the video of the towers falling over and over again. Political and war photographs are popular because of our culture and how the people in it are so attracted to paying attention to tragedy. In the Ritchin reading, he was talking about how they were on a deadline and used a photograph of white jazz players and that it didn't really matter what photograph they used because it wasn't big news. This is an example of how the little stories that are just happy and documentary aren't always the most popular to be photographed, or the ones that stick in people's minds, solely because of society wanting to see tragedy. We are so much more likely to pay attention to something when it's tragic, and photographs are the first things to often document tragedy, and Ritchin highlights this. The power of the photograph is translated to the public in tragic events, and many other great photographs of less tragic events are often misused, as Ritchin highlighted. The notion of photographs being misused is something that happens often in journalistic photography; the meaning of photographs are twisted in journalism. I found the bit about camouflaging the artificiality in context to him taking a photograph of politicians with a bunch of other photographers in the frame to be very interesting. The editor wants to manipulate a scene to change its meaning, and it's makes me think that the public shouldn't trust everything they see in journalistic photography; journalists are twisting the power of the photograph to portray some other meaning to better support their own arguments, which is unfortunate because photographs should speak truths, and show truths, to viewers. Journalistic photography is a virtual reality where the journalists are telling us how to think, how to view, essentially.