The Power of Photography

We will be amazed on how much photography can affect us and how it changes the world today. According to Walsh (2006), written text is only one part of the message, and no longer the dominant part. Printed text used the be the major seller in most media but today, we all can see that visual plays a big role with text in delivering message to the people too.

During the Iraq war which started during the year 2003 which was entirely control by the troops of United States and United Kingdom. Through political view, the war was right but the president was wrong (Jonathan Rauch, 2007). There were bombs and air raids drop into villages in Iraq causing the innocents; more than one million people mainly young children have died as a direct result of the US led blockade on Iraq (Rania Masri). During the war,there were lack of food and medicine, women were not able to breast-feed their children, families were not able to feed them well which lead to a lot of them seeing their children died on the way to the hospital.

Image Source: War Photo Limited by Kate Brooks

Caption: Devastated by the magnitude of the bombing at the Tomb of Imam Ali mosque and unable to retrieve smoldering corpses in a nearby burning car, men become hysterical.

President Obama then took over to deal with the policies and torture created by Bush administration. He took very precautions steps such as discouraging private commission to further investigate the torturing and releasing Pentagon photos of abuses instead of opposed releasing it. During the National Archiver speech, he said "We need to focus on the future with a strong desire to focus on the past,"

There are millions of photographs taken during the war by journalists and photographers and being shared through the nets and galleries around the world. It allows the world to know in a global perspective way what actually happens during the world.

The problem is, text could not deliver the story like how photographs can. According to Wade Goddard "In the media, we have editos, publishers, who are sitting at their desks with their own political or ideological views of telling the story," Photographers were there when pictures was taken, and they were the one who smell, felt and touched the story. Juan C. Dürsteler said that "Visual information is generally better remembered than verbal information," Photographs of Iraq war may remain a longer time in our mind compare to written text.

The Iraq war gives a big impact towards the world through photographs taken during the war and the photographs as the witness to such events tells the world about the violence and injustice in many places these days what drives photographers to show the world.

References

Jonathan Schell, Torture and the Truth, The Nation on Iraq War, Viewed 8th June 2009, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090615/schell

Juan C. Dürsteler, An Image is worth 1000 words, Viewed 8th June 2009, http://www.infovis.net/printMag.php?lang=2&num=18

Rania Masri, The Women and Children in Iraq, Viewed 8th June 2009, http://www.ibiblio.org/prism/Mar97/iraq.html

Walsh, M 2006, The 'textual shift': Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts', Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 24-37

War Photos Limited, Viewed 8th June 2009,

http://www.warphotoltd.com/?section=museum&page=3&item=1

Wikipedia, Iraq War, Viewed 8th June 2009, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War

Zfacts, Reasons for Iraq War, Viewed 8th June 2009, http://zfacts.com/p/775.