Week 8 ~ Photography

All photos are accurate. None of them is the truth. ~Richard Avedon

Why do we consider photography as a form of cultural critique? Is every photograph able to do so?

Photographs are a powerful instrument to critique culture. 

Anthropologists have used photography to provide visual information about their subjects since the 1860s.   Historically, photography was considered to be a recording device for surface data, as opposed to in-depth data, which required to be unearthed by other methods.

In the past thirty years, an increasing number of social researchers in the United Kingdom have recognised that the visual is a growth point in the social sciences and cultural studies.   

Photographs were used as a form of cultural critique in the 1920s.    

For example, photographers El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko sought to inform understanding of social revolution in the early days of the Soviet Union using a photomontage approach. Alfred Eisenstaedt and Erich Salomon, both are photojournalists, applied photo-reportage or photo-essays to communicate social situations (Gidal 1973). The Picture Post in England and Time, Life, and Fortune in the United States published the work of photojournalists such as: Margaret Bourke-White (the first female war correspondent), Walker Evans, W. Eugene Smith, and Robert Capa. 

Yet Becker was concerned that photography had come to be viewed like an art form, and sociology was treated like a science. He called for them to be reunited and to join hand to uncover different aspects of social life. Some sociologists took up the challenge, and visual research methods were increasingly used in various sociological studies (Ruby 1976, Becker 1978, Wagner 1979). 

Material culture is an aspect of visual studies. Paying attention to the images that are important in the daily lives of people open up conversations about values and aspirations. 

David Morgan (1999) in his argument mentioned that the meaning of an image is not merely the act of putting it on the wall, but also exists in its display and ongoing presence in the owner's life.

References:

Wright, T. (1999). Photography as a cultural critique. Photography handbook (pp. 135-­‐151). London
and New York: Routledge.

Wells,L. (1997). Thinking about photography. Photography: a critical introduction (pp. 24-­‐54) London: Routledge.

http://www.quotegarden.com/photography.html