Rachel Hyden
"Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.” Marcus Aurelius.
A new form of storytelling is under construction, combining photojournalism and cinematic film making that shatters the traditional two-dimensional frame. It’s called Condition ONE, and it gives viewers the opportunity to “step inside the frame and experience the stories as the protagonists” (A New Way to Photograph War, Witty).
Condition ONE is an iPad app that uses a custom camera system that captures the entire human field of view. Thus, the viewer will be able to move the iPad in any direction and see the correlating view. According to Condition ONE creator Danfung Dennis, society has become numb to images of war, and Condition ONE will “shake viewers out of their numbness to traditional media and provide them a powerful emotional experience” (Witty).
So photojournalism has found a new method of capturing truth on film, and no tampering is necessary to make these images sing. Unfortunately, not all photos can be taken using high-tech cameras, so sometimes photojournalists look to unethical alteration procedures to jazz up their photos. According the National Press Photographers Association's Code of Ethics, "editing should maintain the integrity of the photographic images' content and context. Do not manipulate images or add or alter sound in any way that can mislead viewers or misrepresent subjects." But even with this code of ethics, photojournalists continue to manipulate photos, and have been doing so since the mid 1800's.
(Check out this blog post to see the manipulation of photos through time.)
But why? Why have so many journalists stooped to the level of manipulating their photos? Could it be an attempt to remove their own perspective from the photo and give the viewer the sense of actually being in the moment? Maybe not in the photo above, but such attempts could exist. Unfortunately, with a two-dimensional photo, everything seen is a perspective. Photojournalism captures a moment in the eyes of the photographer; what they find newsworthy at the moment their shutter snaps. And that photo is the truth, unless it's manipulated, it's the truth, even if it’s only one moment in time from one humans perspective. But as modern technology continues to advance, and more applications like Condition ONE become available, we may see the day when photojournalism gives the viewer a chance to see a story from their very own perspective.
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