As found in the article The Power of Photography, the War Photo Limited Gallery is a dedicated art gallery that keeps exclusive war photography in the city of Dubrovnik. This unique photography gallery portrays close up war pictures that illustrates the inches of details of people suffering from losing lives and assets. But why these remorseful pictures? Is it really necessary to keep alive a filled with war photography gallery in a city that suffered from a dark history of war less than two decades ago? Goddard from the article certainly says yes as these pictures allows the public to get a little more details and closer touch with those whose lives were affected through the war.
Also in the article, it was stated that a picture would mean more than words. Editors of newspapers and news television can choose what they want to show the public and what not and also add in what they think would be interesting to gain more viewers’ attentions. However, as a man who was in the presence of the war and takes up-close pictures of the scene, Goddard would be able to show the world what exactly happened, in-depth details of the arena. According to Kress & Van Leeuwen (2006), a visual component of a text is independent, organized and structured, while images are open to a variety of meanings, ‘a floating chain of signifieds’. This means that every word that is printed on a newspaper of a war can at most bring fear to the readers but not give them a sight of the pain felt which a simple picture of a dead army would do. Another few authors who agree to the strength of photography are Burgess, Enzle and Morry (2000) where they stated that pictures taken are used to measure internal processes, self-representations and understanding of the social world.
An example of how a newspaper article versus a picture of a war is shown below:
a) The New York TImes reporters telling the world what they think about the war:
The question of this article is, how sure are the reporters on how the people were killed in the war?
b) A picture showing a pile of people bombed to death in Vietnamese war,
This picture on the other hand shows the true pain on how people were killed.
Ethically, I would say that it is quite cruel for Dubrovnik to have this war filled photo gallery. Yet, I would not deny the fact that these pictures are lessons that mankind has to learn from and not repeat the suffering that is caused through a war. Hence, the power of photography is clearly very strong where it serves its purpose of capturing moments that are meant to be remembered forever whether it is a sweet memory or a disastrous event.
References:
Burgess, M, Enzle, ME & Morry, M 2000, “The social psychological power of photography: can the image-freezing machine make something of nothing?”, European Journal of Social Psychology, no. 30, pp. 613-630.
Kress, G & van Leeuwen, T. 2006, Reading images, Chapter 1: The semiotic landscape: language and visual communication
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