‘Eliciting Poignancy’

 

General Photography

Over at (Notes on) Politics, Theory & Photography Jim discusses a very interesting case of how a photographer carefully choosing a certain viewpoint changes the overall picture - and its impact - quite a bit. And then, in the final story - which appeared in the most prominent newspaper in the US, the image was cropped, again changing the impact of the photo. It’s interesting how most people would probably find something like this not problematic, but then a photographer who edits out some feet in a photo taken at some high-school sports event in the middle of nowhere gets fired for altering his photography. Make no mistake, photographers have always used cropping and framing - after all, that is part of photography - but I think it’s worthwhile to keep this in mind when getting so agitated about “digital manipulations”.