the power of photograph

Frederic Hanrez is the owner of The War Photo Limited Gallery which specialized to show some pictures from Croatian war in Dubrovnik city in the early 1990s. Wade Goddard is the photojournalist, he was work as photojournalist for about 10 years. The design of this gallery is mainly to memories of war that happened in Dubrovnik and to get the visual images from the war although now Dubrovnik was slowly restored and became a major city of tourist attraction (The Media Report, 2007). Therefore, most local rather forget about the war, but the photographic gallery that takes place in the city’s centre is trying to keep the memories alive and make them more aware about this war and the conflict behind it. The gallery is contributed exclusively to war photography.

“If the viewer doesn’t have any background information about a picture then they can only pull from their existing knowledge, a hypothetical conclusion about what the image is trying to portray” (Julsm, 2007). Besides, in my opinion, I think that although people doesn’t have any background about the picture about the war that happened in Dubrovnik, they can easily understand the meaning behind the photograph, because it’s shows what was really happened during the war. Kress & Leeuwen (1996) site that images give a greater proportion than written text. It is because images can spontaneously represent the meaning while text is harder to illustrate the meaning because we have to use our thought to read and understand the text. Photograph is the most important aspect to represent the real situation (Walsh, 2006.p.32).

Concerning about the variety of picture, I think that when people look on the photos that displayed in this gallery can easily get the meaning using their own perspective because genres are ways of sense related with a social point and a social occasion ( Schirato and Yell, 1996)

List of Reference:

Julesm 2007, The meaning behind Photographs, Wordpress.com, viewed 14 June 2009,

http://julesm.wordpress.com/2007/10/23/the-meaning-behind-photographs/

Walsh 2006, The textual shift: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts, Australian Journal of language and literacy, 29(1), pp 24-37

Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. 2006, Chapter 1: The semiotic landscape: language and visual communication, Reading images, Routledge, pp. 16-44

Schirato, T & Yell, S 1996, Framing contexts, Communication and cultural literacy: an introduction, Allen & Unwin, St. Leonards, N.S.W, pp. 90 – 117.

Heizman, S 2007, ‘The power of the photograph’, The Media Report, Viewed 13 June 2009, <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/mediareport/stories/2007/2051819.htm>