Photography, rhetoric, and synthesization.

Today's topic is photography, and how it is used to convey messages, and to portray and perserve what the artist sees.

Most rhetoric in photography relies on pathos or kairos. It uses mostly context and feeling to evoke the desired reaction in the observer. Photographs aren't meant to capture a moment, they are meant to prolong and preserve it, so that others may observe the event much later. Sometimes this leads to exaggerations in the situation portrayed. A photo of a family fighting may unintentionally make observers believe that family's home life is a wreck, even if it was one fight. On the flip side, a photo of a family saying grace at the table peacefully may portray a serene home life, when that moment is fleeting and home life is nowhere near that.
This means that photography could be a good vessel for propaganda, finding ways to exaggerate and extend situations like environmental disasters, or wars.

The reading also included commentary on how the world of photography has changed over the years. In it's infancy, photography was painstaking and tedious. Exposures took hours and developing the pictures took even longer. Over time, photography has become easier and more accepting of amateurs. These new photographers revolutionized the art by breaking the standards, and creating much more diverse pictures. Over time, we've developed the capability to take photos instantly on our smart phones, making our memorable moments much easier to catch, and the number of pictures taken increase exponentially. These photos still hold value to the people taking them, but there is such volume, and such little true photography involved in these pictures that most of them don't make any impact to the masses. In some ways, this new wave of photos has sacrificed quality and impact for quantity in personal value.