Photographs enable people to capture much more than just a new profile picture for Facebook. Photographs allow people to vividly capture particular moments in time. The reading in CDA focuses on documentary photography and it how it is analyzed. The reading suggest that photographs do not "capture" reality. The essential idea of the reading claims that photographs are always rhetorical, in which they consist of a photographer making decisions about how an audience's attentions will be directed and shaped as the audience looks at a photograph. While this is true of much photography, particularly documentary photography, I argue that it is not true of all photographers.
At one point in my continuous battle of "what do I want to be when I grow up," I thought being a photographer was in the cards. However, it was this very idea that drove me away from the industry. I love photography. I love the way an image can spark something in an individual, similar to an old song or familiar smell. I love the way an eery photograph can haunt an individual, a touching photograph bring tears, and a beautiful photograph inspire a loss of words. However, I do not love the idea of throwing a watermark on a photograph and calling yourself a professional. I do not love the idea of enhancing, boosting the color, changing some contrast and lighting, and calling yourself a professional. No, that's not what photography is. Photography for me is candidly capturing the real moments. The hollow moments. The moments where you catch people or things being who or what they really are.
The reading in the book tells us how to analyze photography, something I love. Real photography is an art form in itself. A photograph can speak volumes.
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