Exercise 1.1: This is where I live part 2

Part 2:
Review this second set of images and consider the role of the social documentary photographer.  Is it possible to create a false impression?  When we look at the work of documentary photographers do we believe what we see?  Is integrity therefore an issue for the social documentary photographer?

Answer these questions and support your argument using your own images as evidence in your learning log or blog.

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Consider the role of the social documentary photographer.  Is it possible to create a false impression?

Social documentary photographers can create a false impression with their pictures.  Views can be pleasant and enjoyable when in actual fact beaches are overcrowded and facilities are very poor or non-existent.  Outside the months of July and August Lyme Regis is a very pleasant place to live with its population of approximately 4,500 residents.  During July and August the population swells to over 10,000 and it is an unpleasant place to live.  Car parking is completely inadequate and cars tour around the town blocking roads whilst trying to find somewhere to park.  The old part of the town is completely wrong for today’s large modern cars and with drivers unwilling to give way, the roads become grid locked for long periods.

Public impression of Lyme in high summer:

Actual beach occupancy of Lyme in high summer:

Could be up to two thousand people on the beach at any one time

  

Actual traffic situation during summer months

 

 When we look at the work of documentary photographers do we believe what we see?  Is integrity therefore an issue for the social documentary photographer?

Unless we know otherwise, we take what we see at face value and accept the images as real.  If we have prior knowledge of the photographer’s lack of integrity, then I would question what I saw before me.

Integrity, once lost, can be very difficult to recover.  If a photographer becomes known as someone who manipulates situations to suit their own agenda, then people, who know what they are capable of doing, will find it very difficult to trust their work.  Sebastian Selgardo is renowned for his work on exposing the sink pits of human degradation around the world and his work is taken as being a true record of his experiences.

On another front, if a photographer’s work is deliberately wrongly captioned and then published, the publishing genre (i.e., daily / weekly newspaper, intellectual publication) will lose their credibility and this could affect sales of the said publication.  See following website for hoax/misleading captions:

http://hoaxes.org/photo_database/photo_category/category/false_caption

It is possible to create a totally misleading impression regarding situations that are very hard to dispel when read by the general public.  One person’s point of view can totally mislead.

There have been many times where situations have been misrepresented in photographs when captions make the viewer think something other than the true situation is occurring.  I can remember a photograph in one newspaper where a man was supposedly shouting abuse at a woman on the other side of some iron railings during the poll tax riots in Central London.  In fact the woman was asking the man if he was okay and he was replying.  The true facts came out later when the woman wrote into the newspaper stating what was actually happening, not what had been inferred by the caption.

The website below shows how photographs could be put together and come up with a completely different situation than that of the individual images.

https://patriotpost.us/pages/70

Captions and articles need to be seen as accurate or all creditability will be lost forever.