As the idea of journalism photography came into the spotlight during the early 1900s, the immigration crisis and child labor were some of the main subjects documented. These images appeal to pathos on purpose, to evoke empathy from the viewer. But this also begs the question if these photos are completely unorchestrated. Personally, I do not think so. But I do not believe that is entirely a bad thing, specifically for this photo. It may or may not be posed but it effectively shows the other side of the issues at hand during that time. I appreciate people that are willing to document and put the less glamorous in the spotlight to help give a fuller picture of the situation. The mud-raker did this for political and humanitarian reasons. I think people now use social media to try to either gloss over the main issues or exploit them.
I remember talking about this during my gap year. Whenever there is camera present, people naturally want to show only the best version of themselves. The same goes for putting those images on social media. During the gap year, we would post our adventures online and it eventually occurred to us that the part we were showing our friends and family was only a fraction of what we were actually going through. The pictures we took of us playing in the snow were genuine, but they did not show the fact we had to sleep in our zero degree sleeping bags, sometimes a few of us in the same bunk, just to stay warm for the night. Our epic mountain bike videos did not show that almost half of the students had suffered several hard crashes during the training for that trip and some were still nursing those wounds. The cute photo of a couple students hanging out in hammocks doesn’t show the fact that they were resting after finishing a three hour dish clean and they all smell like the sauce that was plastered on every plate. There is always more going on behind the scenes.
I really appreciate the fact that the photographers behind the social documentation were willing to go into the messy places and expose what was going on. America was seen as such a dream of freedom and opportunity but that was not the whole picture. These images inspire me as photographer because I want to continually search and capture the moments that show the raw reality of a story. The epic photos of mountains and rivers are cool, but the ones of the rain pouring down on the trail or the broken paddles that were a constant frustration create a different voice and wholesome element to the whole story.
Work at Camp (McKenna Watson)