Week 8: Photography

Week 8: Photography: Reconceptualising culture, memory and space.

Qn: How do captions and cutlines reframe the meaning of an image?

Is picture worth a thousand words?  

How can you explain the picture above? You would think that it was just a blank box or rectangle. But for me, it's  more than that, I captured this photo in my home when the electricity were cut off. Apparently, some irresponsible people stole the copper wire from the power house which caused inconvenience for us and the people in the neighborhood. It happened at times when I needed to finish off my assignments and what's more, my laptop's battery was flat at that very crucial moment. God bless whoever stole the copper wire!

Involuntary earth hour -.-

The reason why I captured that picture was to remember the moment. I uploaded it to a social  network site and added it with some caption so  that it made more sense, or at least it gives meaning to it rather than just a little black box; it would be the most randomest picture ever I took. 

In photojournalism, cutlines and captions are important factor to put into a photograph because it tells a story. As people raise question upon looking at a photograph , that cutlines and captions can help them answer their curiousity. Another thing to consider is reader's behaviour whereby good cutlines would arouse the reader's interest, and he/she might want to  further gather the information by reading the whole article. So it can be said that captions and cutlines are the key information, thus it must be readable and informative or else it would lead to confusion among the readers. 

The picture above shows pictures of artist with babies whereby captions and cutlines are provided to inform the readers the story behind the photograph. The intention for photographs was an effort by Korean Social Welfare Society in their effort to help the adoption of the babies. This however, have been manipulated by fans to create some humour by changing the caption of the photo as seen below. This is also known as macro which is popular among discourse community of an online forum which certainly have different common goals from the common public.

The caption made up by the fan has changed the entire meaning of the photograph. This shows how captions and cutlines reframe the meaning of the picture. This however, cannot be applied to photojournalism because one have to consider the ethical issues in photojournalism and be as accurate as possible so that it does not break the principles of photojournalism.

References:

Ghostwriter. G-dragon and Taeyang with babies. Retrieved from  http://www.allkpop.com/2009/11/g-dragon_and_taeyang_with_babies

Photo Captions and Cutlines. Retrieved from http://web.ku.edu/~edit/captions.html