Photography in the Current Media

    In our current day and age visual media is something we are bombarded with on a daily basis. When you wake up in the morning you might turn on your phone or your TV and read articles or watch a morning news show to get the latest, up to date news. In the afternoon when your home you might watch TV which is just a portal into a world of visual media, or maybe read a magazine or newspaper online full of pictures of your favorite topics. Maybe you will go watch a movie and while you watch it you may not even notice this as a form of visual media as well. Visual media is everywhere, photography being one the oldest, followed by movies and then TV. All of these forms are important in furthering cultural transmission, or conveying beliefs, ideas, values, and practices of a culture. More importantly though they also serve surveillance purposes, meaning they lend credibility to the stories we see and hear. As technology improves though, are some of these forms of visual media becoming obsolete? With the advent and progress of video and film technology that can capture entire worlds at a time, is photography, which can only capture a single scene in any given photo, falling behind in usefulness? In my opinion, I would say no.

   It is true that video and film can capture enormous slices of life between their recording length and the sound they capture, but sometimes this can be more of a curse than a blessing. A photo of a sunrise at just the right moment and angle can portray immense beauty and pleasure in a viewer, but if you used a camera to film the suns decent from when it begins to fall till when it disappears, you get a long boring video of the sky that will most likely bore the viewer before they hit the magic moment in which the photograph quickly expressed. In other situations filming an entire event may not be allowed or might be frowned upon, in which case photography is a quick and discreet way to capture a moment. The main advantage of photography is its ability to capture a single moment that is the peak of emotion, and that will be able to convey these emotions quickly and efficiently to the photos audience. Famous photography like the ones below prove this point, and I think proves the worth of a photograph over a video in certain situations.

The Most Beautiful Suicide

Edward Abbey- Landscape,  Time Magazine

Great Depression photography

   Their is one more reason that I believe photography is far from obsolete in the media. Sadly this isn't a good reason or one to be proud of. In the media, often the truth is not king when trying to get information out to people. Sometimes the truth is distorted to show a reality somewhat different from what real reality is, all in an effort to sow the seeds of a certain emotion in viewers. I do not mean to say this is right or just or even that it happens all that commonly, but I do believe it is something that really happens and that some higher ups in media abuse in order to meet their own ends. Photography is the easiest form of media to manipulate in this way, whether through cropping or photoshop, a picture is a medium that depending on its source may not always be a good idea to take at face value. Because of photography's easy malleability though, I feel it will stay in social, and especially news media for a long time.