The Yarmouk photograph was released by the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees and illustrates an instance where over 18,000 refugees were waiting in line to get some food from UN workers. Kandutsch (2015) was struck by this published image and tried to understand the meaning behind it. He proposed that it might be captured to trigger the audiences’ moral conscience or for the purpose of aesthetics or punctum.
Starting with the last notion, the author disagreed that it might be serving the claim of punctum. This term is really important in photojournalism where photographers tend to focus on rare details that will attract the consumers attention. However, Kandutsch (2015) believed that this photograph may make people recall a private experience when this picture should catch the attention of the global community.
The author therefore preferred to state that this picture follows the ‘absorption’ and ‘facingness’ norms of photojournalism. The former describes pictures that present a freezing intsant of action that’s being done by the captured subjects, without them being aware of the shot. The latter, by contrast, refers to the characteristics of the photo in general and not the subject of it; therefore, the way the photo is captured is depicted by facingness.
On another hand, Share (2018) claims that photojournalism can never be objective as each decision while taking the photograph, whether it is the angle, the location, the caption, or the subject, are all considered to be subjective. I, completely agree that jornalists can never be objective since there’s always indirect bias in articles even if they were news articles. It could be through the pictures taken, the headlines, the wordchoice, or even the sources.
References: Share, J. (n.d.). The Camera Always Lies: Breaking the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity. Retrieved from: https://www.medialit.org/reading-room/camera-always-lies
Kandutsch, C. (2015). A Yarmouk Photograph. In CTheory. Retrieved from: http://ctheory.net/ctheory_wp/a-yarmouk-photograph/
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