Life in the Moment

"A picture has no meaning at all if it can't tell a story."
Eetu Silanpaa

Picture stories are everywhere – on magazines, newspapers, TV, movies, billboards, graffiti, phones and even our money. I can’t help but wonder though, why do we pay so much more attention to picture stories in society than traditional written media?

As we saw in our week 4 lecture, stories have been told in images since the stone ages and have progressed all the way through religious drawings and stain glass windows, newspaper drawings to photographs, movies, TV and now even immediate capture and upload through our smart phones. As we progress through society the quality of pictures has become better and better as our technology further progresses; sadly, we now focus so much on what is in the picture that real images are not good enough.

This Dove commercial sums up our demand for perfection. Why be you when you can be younger, thinner, prettier and impossibly perfect?

Of course photo journalism isn’t all bad. Photos capture the moment and give us a sense of being there. The addition of photo galleries to online news articles allow us a deeper understanding, especially when it came to describing events such as the London riots or the ongoing rebellion in the Arab Springs countries.

So what does it take to make a good photo? I could tell you, theoretically, that you need framing, focus, angle & point of view (POV), exposure (or light), timing (shutter speed) and an all-round capturing “The Moment” feel, but what’s the point in telling you when I can show you?

Describing the September 11 attacks will never do the atrocity justice, or accurately emote the feelings I felt as I lived in America and watched these images live on TV. While we may forget why these attacks happened in the jumble of the war on terrorism , these images will live with all of us for a life time.

‘History decays into images, not stories’
Walter Benjamin