Unit #2 Blog Post 8 – We Cannot Only Rely On Photographs.

Unit #2 Blog Post 8 – We Cannot Only Rely On Photographs.

        In the New York Times, Errol Morris explains that we cannot say “true” or “false” when we only see the photographs from his article “Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire”. He emphasizes that photographs should also showing with captions, contexts and descriptions in order to let people believe. If there are only images without context, we cannot see it is true or false. In the first part, he shows some old photos of his childhood, he said that although he forgot some things or details for those old images, he still could remember what happen at that times because he familiar with his own story. However, if the photos we are not familiar and show without contexts, we will not know the exact meaning of photos. He gives a really great example of the Lusitania and Titanic. If a boat shows in the picture without caption “Lusitania”, we may think of Titanic. At the last part, he shows three pictures to describe the things happened at the Lusitania, and those pictures all have different influences or feeling to bring to people. Morris wants to point that do not just rely on the pictures, and we also need to look at the contexts or captions because the combination can provide the most convictive evidences.

        In my opinion, I agree with Morris’s ideas about pictures are independent information. If there are 1000 people take the pictures of a mountain, there will be 1000 different pictures. I think the role of pictures is just provides a visual part of things or stories, and it cannot regard as the powerful evidences. Also, I think the successful news is the combination with contexts and photos. Photos help readers have visual parts and contexts make people believe. Here I take the example of my own essay about rescue cats’ activities in China from my blog. I post some pictures in the beginning of my article. Those pictures show the poor cats are caught in the cages, rescued by volunteers and then got medical helps from animal hospitals. Those pictures shows that the cats got really great helps, but actually they will all have difficult and hard lives because the both of environments and people cannot raise 1000 cats at the limited times. The pictures do not show things, but those cats may be die, eat or catch behind the pictures. We cannot only believe what the pictures show to us. We also need to believe the truth. Here is the link of my article:

http://victoria0517.blogspot.com/2013/02/short-essay1-cats-problems.html