Can Photographs Change the World?

 Photo by: Thomas E. Franklin

Image Source: http://www.worldsfamousphotos.com/tag/911/

The photo of the firefighters raising the flag affected me in many different ways. The image is so emotional for so many people and really showed what our country was all about. I was young when the attacks on the Twin Towers happened but I still remember the day perfectly. My parents told us not to turn on the TV until there were there with us to explain what happened. When I saw the image of the firefighters it brought back all of those memories. It made me think of everything that happened after 9/11 and how emotional it was. It really made me realize the fight our country put up to save everyone they could. It made me realize that we do not give up, no matter the circumstances. It helped me see what was really going on at ground zero. The photo is moving and I’m sure it is for many other people too. It is an image I will never forget.

  Photos have a huge effect on our world. But do they change the world? In my opinion photos can influence someone’s perspective on the world and make them change in some way. This can lead to changes in the world but a photo does not directly change the world. It is just like Johnathan Klein said that photos cause “provoked reactions in people, those reactions have caused change to happen”. The images help contribute to the changing world. There are many famous photos that are said to change the world. But how do you measure that? It is from the reactions of the people that are measurable. A picture that really shows this is the one of Earth from outer space. The picture did not change the world, but it changed society's perspective on what our world really looks like. It was a moment in history that we will never forget and it may have lead to a change, but the picture itself did not change the world.

Photo by: Apollo 8
Image Source: Dailymail.com

There is an example of some photos that have swayed many people’s opinions. One example of this is Boris Yeltsin dancing after his speech. The famous Pulitzer Prizewinning photo was said to help Yeltsin win the election. The image did not directly change the world but Yeltsin winning the election could have changed the world. The image altered people’s opinions but the people acting on that what was what helped to make a change in the world. Johnathan Klein says that we all have a choice, we can either look away or we can act. This is important when thinking about if an image changes the world. Does the image go and act on what is happening? It’s us that make that choice not the image.

There is no doubt that pictures have an effect on society. But society only allows us to see certain images. The government censors almost all of the pictures that are put into the public. Professor Nordell mentions a famous quote to help explain what censorship can do. He says “if a tree falls in the woods and no one’s around to hear it, did it make a sound?” The government controls what can be shown and what can’t be. There are 6 companies that control 90% of the media according to Business Insider. There is so much constricting information because of the big companies that monitor the media. As Professor Nordell states there is a rising of internet publishing. This weighs out the big companies controlling what is in the media. The internet helps to give freedom to photojournalists to really show the images that they want to. One example of this is war photos. They can sometimes be very graphic and need to be controlled. Johnathan Klein says that “Images caused government to change their policies”. I think that that statement is true because they made images censored because of certain things society was seeing. In the 1960's during Vietnam the government allowed many graphic images to be displayed and that influenced society on what to think about war. Ted Rall explains the images of Vietnam with "A stream of media reports and images describing spectacular carnage suggested that the United States was embroiled in a brutal, dehumanising struggle." This is just another one of the reasons that the government censored images to the public.