I
truly appreciated Miller’s essay about her experience at the siege of St. Malo
because of its honesty and rich description of what it was really like
witnessing accounts of war. There is a sense that being a photographer in the
war is a glamorous job, but after reading this, you start to put into
perspective how bad war is for anyone involved in any capacity. The part that
stuck out to me the most was the paragraph on page 182 starting with, “There
was no one in the…” because of the unmistakable feelings of emptiness and
lifelessness she describes so beautifully. She goes into detail of her feelings
of anger and disgust at all of the destruction, as she heaves a detached hand
across the street in helplessness. A flower pot in a roomless room, flies
hovering dead bodies, lonesome flea-infested cats named Tarzan. It is all quite
dramatic and captivating in a particularly disturbing way.
In
a portion of the Wells reading, when introducing why war photography is significant
to the development of photojournalism, one of the reasons given is because many
people gain knowledge about war from photos, rather than literature. I personally kept coming back to this point
while reading Miller’s essay, since I think the type of information you receive
by reading a story rather than interpreting it from a photograph are much
different, yet the same. I Google searched some of the photos she took after
this battle ended, and the destruction shown matched what you read in her
writing. Though, there is a certain element of personalization, a kind of
unique voice, given when you read her story rather than view her photographs.
That is not to say that one is more valuable, but I do believe that there is a
difference, and this should be recognized.
1 comment:
Wells reading on war photography really related to what we learned in class. I agree with your post that war photography was a major development of photojournalism. Information that interprets from a photo and from a reading are completely different. Both can be misunderstood. People might remember something different from someone else.
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