Item 4 - Visuals, meaning, cultural/ situational context & photojournalism issues

The power of the photograph

Initially, there was a war in Europe and it leaves unhappy memories to the locals. Nevertheless, the tourist finds the city, Dubrovnik, attractive as it was the city destroyed during the war. There is a photo gallery in the city displaying photographic of the war. However, very few local would visit the photographic gallery due to terrific memories they had. Hence, most visitors are the tourist. Wade Goddard, the photo keeper stated an important purpose they organize this gallery, which is a photographer tells the true stories as he felt, smell and touched the story. Comparing to editors who sitting on their chair and choosing the content for the readers, the editor actually choose photograph based on their political and ideological views. Besides, Funell (2007) wanted to let the government understand the consequences on the nation before sanitising a new war. This will create impact to the women and children. Furthermore, Walsh (2006, p.32) stated photograph can give realistic feeling the reader. Hence, the tourists enable to understand the meaning of the photography by looking on it. One of the tourist said that photographs on magazine are different from what they saw in the gallery.

Turner (2004) stated photojournalism has become a special form of witnessing. This is where the issues occur where photographer and editor telling different stories in different mediums but the same event. As magazine will be published in the whole nationwide, hence the editor has to edit the multimodal text carefully in order not to bring sensitive and offensive issues to the readers. Besides, this is about war issue and it has relation to the government. Therefore, there is law and regulation that limit what a magazine can show to its reader. However, the reader might doubt the accuracy of the story from the editor

In my opinion, Wade Gorddard is doing a good thing in keeping the history alive through photography. However, this could be also bringing sadness to the locals. He is telling the true story of the war to the audience by showing "evidence" that he has. This also reminds the audience that editor does not always provide credible and truthful information to the reader. Hence, keeping the photo gallery would be good as it is always telling the true story.

Reference List:

Funell, A 2007, "The Power of the Photograph", The Media Report, ABC.Net, viewed 13 June 2010, <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2007/2051819.htm>

Turner, L 2004, "Warfare, photojournalism, and witnessing", The Left Atrium, Viewed 14 June 2010, <http://www.ecmaj.com/cgi/content/full/170/1/82>

Walsh, M 2006, “’Textual shift’: Examining the reading process with print visual and multimodal texts,” Australian Journal Language and Literacy, vol. 29, no. 1, p.24-37