On 10/1/05, iddi <iddibhai@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> http://www.zombietime.com/sf_rally_september_24_2005/anatomy_of_a_photograph/
>
> interesting point the author makes; for you trekkies, as picard says, a
> lie of omission is still a lie. not meaning to be political.
The author makes an interesting point about how the cropping can
change the context of a photo and how it's perceived. But, he then
proceeds to make a number of statements that *seem* to be attempting
to prove how the "left-wing media" manipulate the "truth". But, he
makes the same mistake he's accusing the media of making. He shows you
a number of other photos of the same event and uses them to back his
own agenda without providing any actual facts to back it up.
He shows that the protesters were carrying Palestinian flags and seems
to suggest this as a negative thing but provides no information about
what the protesters were saying about Palestine. Were they saying that
Palestinians have the right to their own state and should achieve that
through peaceful means or were they saying that they support the
Palestinian militant groups? He makes the connection with terrorism
but doesn't really provide any information to back this up.
Then we get the "communist recruiter" who is "manipulating" the young
"naive" teenagers. This falls apart in so many ways. First, any
protest always has organisers, he makes this seem like it's something
particular to this march. Second, most "recruiting" consists of the
organisers putting up signs about a protest march inviting people to
attend. Yes, maybe there was more active recruitment in this protest
march, that's a story, why didn't he present that? And finally, he
says that the "recruiter" is a communist. Yes, she is wearing a shirt
with the Vietnamese flag on it. However, having just returned from
Laos and Vietnam I can tell you that just about every young backpacker
who travels to those countries buys one of those shirts. There's a
sort of "communist chic" in young fashion right now. I think a lot of
that has as much to do with the irony of taking communist imagery and
applying it to mass market goods rather than the actual politics. Not
to mention that a lot of the imagery is very interesting from a
graphic design standpoint. I have a ton of Soviet stuff from when I
stayed in Russia, it has nothing to do with me supporting Soviet
politics. I suspect that a large majority of the people you see
wearing Che Guevara shirts could tell you very little about who he was
and what his politics were beyond him being a cuban revolutionary.
What I see in the picture is a protest organiser directing the
protesters. She appears to be positioning the people holding the
banner to the front of the group so that the banner can be clearly
seen. That's a pretty common sight at any protest march, there's
usually 1 big banner they want everyone else to march behind. The
organisers try to arrange people because they are usually trying to
keep things relatively orderly so that they don't cause any trouble
with the police who are usually monitoring the event to make sure
nothing gets out of control.
The fact that this organiser happens to be wearing a communist shirt
*may* have some significance but without knowing what group(s)
organised the events and what their political ideologies are it's not
possible for me to draw any conclusions from that. The author seems to
want you to draw the conclusion that she's a communist and of course
we all know that communism is bad, therefore the protest is bad and
the media is bad for not telling us it was run by a bunch of no good
commies.
To get this a little more on-topic, I agree that with news photography
you have to be very careful with how you present the photos. However,
I think the biggest responsibility is for the attached story to
provide the context for the photos and fill in the facts. The mistake
the author has made is that he's taken a single news photo out of the
original context of its story and then uses his own photos of the same
event to try to create a new context, but he doesn't support that with
proper facts either. He tries to assert that his photos give you the
"truth" but in both cases I think the "truth" comes from pairing the
photos with a news story that fills in the facts that you don't get
from the photos.
Sorry about the long-winded reply.
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