Reflection On The Past 3 Weeks

In these 3 weeks I have learned a lot of things. I notice that this module tends to get us involved with a lot of pictures and our lessons mainly revolve around them. As a photographer myself, I always used to think that taking photos was only about finding the best angle, using the correct amount of zoom and clicking on the shutter at the right time to get the very best picture, but this module has taught me that photography is more than just capturing the most beautiful photo. I have learned that photos can be used to tell stories. I'm sure most of you have heard of the adage "a picture expresses a thousand words". Most of the time we look at a picture, and we think about what is in the picture, and we try to find that story the photographer is trying to tell with the picture. In this manner, pictures are similar to books, but this is not the only aspect in which they resemble each other. While a book can have a plot twist, the story told my a picture can be more than meets the eye.

I learned that trying to understand what a picture tells us by merely looking at it is like judging a book by its cover, and doing this is always misleading. We were shown two photos. One was of a man on the streets begging, the other of a woman carrying a child, also begging. When asked which one of the two the class would help, we came to a unanimous decision to help the woman, as we judged "a book" by "its cover". We came to this decision as we felt the man was less worthy of needing help as he could still support himself with a job but the woman had to provide for herself and her child, which caused us to pity the woman more. But, as I have mentioned, we judged "the book" by "its cover". We learned that the man who was shown begging was actually handicapped and desperately needed money for himself as he could not get a job, while the woman was working for a beggars' syndicate; which is, in a nutshell, an organization of people posing as beggars to beg for money. Even the baby the woman was carrying was most likely fake. After our class came to this realization, some of us changed our minds about helping the woman and decided to help the man instead. Through this I learned a lesson that photography is not always about taking the best photo. Photography can also be used as a means to tell a story, and that story is not always what it seems to be. If we interpret it as what it seems to be, we may be judging a book by its cover.

-Ian (26)