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Photographs: Truth Compared to What?

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Submitted By jjsky3000
Words 1049
Pages 5
Jasmine Jackson
English 101
Spring 2013

Photographs: Truth Compared to What? I always loved the saying that a picture can convey a thousand words, but really a picture can conjure a thousand perspectives depending on the viewer. There are many factors in differentiating what is real in a photograph, or what is spurious. The only common ground that can’t be argued is that the picture exists. Philip Gefter, a picture editor for the New York Times, and author of essay Photographic Icons: Fact, Fiction, or Metaphor states that “ a photographic image might look like actual reality, but graduations of truth are measured in the circumstances that led up to the moment the picture was taken”(#208 ). This reinforces my notion that a photograph is as true as the observer perceiving the image. Whether a picture is spontaneously captured or posed is not pertinent. However photographs of starlets, and celebrities that have been digitally altered, airbrushed, photo-shopped, is completely deceptive. This can be defined using my own term as pseudo-photos. Furthermore the purpose, depth, and essence of a photo is the most important aspect, and these factors can assist in defining the validity of an image. One historical photo of a black woman named Rosa Parks is one with absolute purpose. Parks was instrumental in the civil rights movement for declining to give her seat up to a white male passenger on a city bus in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama. This caused Parks to be jailed, and threw the media into a frenzy, and the civil rights movement into overdrive. Reporter Nicholas C. Chriss, a reporter for United Press International based out of Atlanta, Georgia, published a photo of Parks. On the photograph of Parks she is sitting on an empty bus with her head turned towards the window, seated behind Park’s was reporter

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