The Power of Photography

In December 2008, the ABC aired a media report entitled “The Power of Photography”. ABC’s Karin Zsivanovits paid a visit to Queensland College of Art at Griffith University in Brisbane as the students were on their way completing their production on a collection of photographic essays entitled “The Australian Photojournalist.”

According to their website, “The Australian Photojournalist” (APJ, 2009) is a non-profit publication that publishes their journal annually. The undergraduate and postgraduate journalists run the editorial board of the APJ. The photographs and contents of the APJ are supplied by professional photojournalist from all over the world.

There’s an old cliché saying “a picture is worth a thousand words”. Basically this issue stresses on the importance of photographs in journalism. Photojournalism means telling a story with a photograph and a caption of a few sentences. Horn (1999, p27) asserts that “the tight coupling of words, images, and shapes into a unified communication unit. ‘Tight coupling’ means that you cannot remove the words or the images or the shapes from a piece of visual language without destroying or radically diminishing the meaning a reader can obtain from it.” We no longer read in a mono-modal way, thus, images play an important part in document design.

Walsh (2006, p29) says that "images have other effects that are different from words, particularly at affective, aesthetic and imaginative levels."

"You would imagine that people from a country that has massive oil reserves have been blessed. But in many countries we went to we were told, unfortunately we have oil. It has been a curse not a blessing." Paolo Woods.

(Source: http://cdp.edu.au/cdp/photojournalist-article/oil-crude-world-paolo-woods)

The above photograph was taken from the APJ website. Without the captions we would not know what the photograph is trying to tell us. The caption tells us that oil is the many reasons why war happens; and the countries that have oil thinks having oil as a natural resource is not lucky after all.

Parker (2008), a professional photographer said in the interview that the increasing developments of new forms of media like Flickr and Facebook has decreased the power of traditional still images. To make a living out of photography nowadays, one has to move from the changing times. There is no longer just depending on a still photograph, but a moving image (videography) as well. In order to successfully communicate with our audience and capture their attention, multi-modal text must be present.

List of References:

Griffith University Queensland College of Art, 2009, About, viewed 18 November 2009, available

<http://cdp.edu.au/cdp/photojournalist/about>

Horn, RE 1999, Information design: Emergence of a new profession Jacobson, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Parker, DD 2008, The Media Report: The Power of Photography, viewed 18 November 2009, available

<http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2008/2447666.htm>

Walsh, M. 2006, ‘The Textual Shift': Examining the Reading Process with

Print, Visual and Multimodal Texts’, Australian Journal of Text and Literacy, vol. 29.