Valuing subjectivity in documentary photography and the media
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Author(s)
Da Silva, Marisol
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2009
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This paper examines issues of subjectivity and objectivity in regard to documentary photography in the broader context of the mass media. It argues that subjectivity cannot be divorced from the process of representation, even though the default belief in 'objectivity' continues to function in the commercially driven mass media. However, it is argued that the Internet and alternate media afford documentary practitioners the opportunity to display frank subjectivity. How objective and subjective ideologies alter 'documentary' photography is examined through a case study on nuclear devastation, which draws examples from ...
View more >This paper examines issues of subjectivity and objectivity in regard to documentary photography in the broader context of the mass media. It argues that subjectivity cannot be divorced from the process of representation, even though the default belief in 'objectivity' continues to function in the commercially driven mass media. However, it is argued that the Internet and alternate media afford documentary practitioners the opportunity to display frank subjectivity. How objective and subjective ideologies alter 'documentary' photography is examined through a case study on nuclear devastation, which draws examples from National Geographic, The Digital Journalist, and the work of Robert Knoth and Antoinette de Jong.
View less >
View more >This paper examines issues of subjectivity and objectivity in regard to documentary photography in the broader context of the mass media. It argues that subjectivity cannot be divorced from the process of representation, even though the default belief in 'objectivity' continues to function in the commercially driven mass media. However, it is argued that the Internet and alternate media afford documentary practitioners the opportunity to display frank subjectivity. How objective and subjective ideologies alter 'documentary' photography is examined through a case study on nuclear devastation, which draws examples from National Geographic, The Digital Journalist, and the work of Robert Knoth and Antoinette de Jong.
View less >
Conference Title
Communication, Creativity and Global Citizenship: refereed proceedings of the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association Conference 2009
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2009. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australian License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/au/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Please refer to the conference's website for access to the definitive, published version.