Places and forms of power

I am going to talk about the notion « Places and forms of power » and more specifically about the power of the photo. Power is the lows of a country, it’s the ability to influence a country or people. It can be used to prevent or to care conflict. It can also be a pressure. In order to illustrate this notion I will try to answer the question « to what extent can a photo say a thousand words ? ». To be able to answer this question I’m going to speak about 3 documents.

The first document is an video where Jonathan Klein speak on TED conference some photos who were changes the world. He show lots of images who are iconic to show their impact on the people because for him and his industry images have provoked reactions in people and those reactions have caused change to happen. For him the for worse is man’s destructive power over man like the images from Guantanamo. The publication of those images, caused a government to change its policies. Now, imagines have power to shed light of understanding on suspicion, ignorance and in particular the issue of HIV. The princess of Wales touching an HIV infected baby did a great deal especially in Europe to stop that because she, better than most, knee the power of an image. So when we are confronted by a powerful image, we all have a choice : we can look away, or we can address the image. Images often to push us to question our core beliefs and our responsibility to each other. One photo say thousand words because we bring to each image our own values, our own belief systems and as a result of that, the image resonates with us.

However a photo can say a thousand words depending on how it is made. The second document is an photo on black and white become known as "Migrant Mother" who is one of a series of photographs that Dorothea Lange made of Florence Owens Thompson and her children. In this image a woman appears with three children. The woman is holding a baby, while two older children are hiding behind her shoulders. The clothing of the woman and children seems worn. The woman does not make eye contact with the camera but looks into the distance and her children turning their faces away from the camera. Although the age of the woman’s children indicates that she may be young, her face appears exhausted. This image was taken during the Great Depression when many families lived in total poverty. The picture is tightly cropped around the figure of the woman, which creates emphasis on the facial expression and body language of the woman, rather than the setting.

Behind this photo is a story that helps to understand why this picture is so talking. This is the text « Fame for Lange but not for Thompson ». In fact, Thomson had a very hard life, she had to work 16 hours per day every day to keep her family together, so that she had to moved to Modesto in 1945 where she found a job in an hospital. She never had received any money from the foto even if she was the most famous face in USA. Even though she always stayed humble because she made the foto to help others getting out their poverty. On the other hand, thanks to this foto, Dorothea Lange, the photographer became famous and returned in the canon of American photographers.

Although she’s a talented photographer, her success wouldn’t have been the same without Thompson which posing to represent the very figure of poverty, and that, is a talent too. Due their

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