Does photography limit or enhance the truth?

Do you ever look see photos as you’re walking down the street and think to yourself, “Is that what is really happening in that photo?”. I know that I do; I see so many photos a day that make me wonder what is real and not real. I believe that photography can limit and enhance our understanding in different situations by the way that we interpret the photo. I don’t believe most of the photos I see because you can never tell whether it’s telling the truth or not.

The issue that we have in society is that we can never tell whether the media is telling the truth or not. This is why I believe that photography limits our understanding of that photo and maybe even the world. In the article, “Picture Imperfect” by Jed Perl, the author states that the Obama administration is hiding the truth. She says “Is Obama administration standing in the way of the truth?” I believe that this is true because the government doesn’t want us to see everything which limits our understanding of the world. In Haggart’s arguement, he states that the photographer Ed Freeman is looking for something that was art, not sport photography. He wants the photos to be how surfing feels and not how it looks so he ended up photoshopping them. He spent hours on his computer trying to make the photos look better, but in reality he was just making the photos tell a lie. He says “wanted the pictures to be how surfing feels”, I understand why he does this, but you don’t need to do that to the photos because then you are lying to your audience and limiting their understanding.

However, when we look at a photo and it has something that we can recognize, it can enhance our understanding of the world. In the article “Exquisite Corpse” by Ashraf Rushdy, he states that a boy by the name Emmett Till was lynched and beaten until he died by a couple white men that have been lynching many innocent civilians. “See what they did to my boy”, Till’s mother had said as she showed everyone what the white men did to her son. She did this because she wanted everyone to see wanted to see the truth of what happened. This enhances the understanding of the truth because it shows how the incident really happened.

It’s also true that when we see a photo, we don’t know when it was taken and where it was taken. This is why I believe that phtotos limit our understanding of the world. In the article “This photo is lying to you” by Rob Haggart, their is a story about a man by the name of David Griffin and in this paragraph it talks about how the people that work for National Geographic are required to send in the photos they take with no editing. They do this because they want the photo to be real. National Geographic says “The magazine requires photos in raw format” which I think is a good thing because if they didn’t do this then it would limit our understanding of these photos very much. Other than National Geographic, almost every other company will edit their photos which is the wrong thing to do if you want your audience to believe what you are showing them.

The way that photos present themselves can be very tricky. We have to make sure these photos do not mess with our perspective on life and make sure we know what we are looking at. If we didn’t have photos then life would be pretty boring and we wouldn’t be able to understand most of the things we hear about, but we have to make sure that what we are looking at is telling us the truth.