I thoroughly enjoyed reading this piece by Roland Barthes on shock photography. He presented some very interesting and solid arguments as to why shock photography just doesn't work as it's really meant to. It's so true that we, as viewers, look at shock photography in our own "freedom" as he put it, in our comfortable homes or in a comfortably tempered gallery room. We're not actually there where that poor girl is being circumcised by smiling older woman, we're not really experiencing it and even though it's still uncomfortable, we are guarded. We're protected by the fact that it is a picture and all of the initial shock of what we're viewing was already soaked up by the photographer herself.
There was one thing that Barthes said in this piece about how shock photography was too intentional for photography and too exact for painting and how they "lack both the scandal of the latter and the truth of art." It just really made me ponder on if shock photography is even considered art. I would think that it would be because just like any type of art, it's usually trying to get a message through to the viewer; shock photography is no different. It's just that we as a people have been so desensitized through the media, whether it be gory movies, graphic video games and explicit lyrics in songs, even books these days, so shock photography makes even less of an impact on the viewer.
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