The power of photograph

Photo can expressed a thousand words. This is agreed by Walsh (2006) that pictures give more meaning than text using visual grammar. Shriver (1997) said that readers can still remember a picture even after long time seeing it. In The power of photograph, it is said that the images in newspaper is what newspaper editor wants the public to see. However what newspaper editor wants the public to see may not be the truth, it may be their political ideology , their bias views.

How can they achieve that, they manipulate the truth , by using pictures.

How Picture lie?

Unfortunately , this is a common practice among media field. Below is the video showing how a normal looking girl can look pretty in billboard.

Other than that, another example is taken from flickr.com to demonstrate the power of photoshop.
The sad thing about this is that "people believe in news photograph. They are more inherent trust in what they see than what they read" ( Lasica, 1988) . It is the matter of ethics that news photos is edited by the publisher. I personally think that it is a dilemma for publisher to be ethical and to be profit making.



In the conclusion, it is advised not to believe some pictures as it may be edited by editor to distort your perception and views.

Reference

Lasica JD 1988, Photograph that lie, viewed 4 June 2009


Schriver, KA 1997, Dynamics in document design: creating texts for readers, Wiley Computer Pub., New York


Walsh, M 2006, The 'textual shift': Examining the reading process with print and visual and multimodal texts, Australian Journal of Language and Literarcy, vol. 29, no. 1, p.24-37.