Truthfulness Of Photography Essay

Photographs might be truthful, but the descriptions of pictures are not at all reliable’ . Photographs have helped to structure social and cultural understandings of the past, they are considered to be important examples of the past but more specifically to when one wants to gain an understanding of social or cultural history. As photographs reveal more about the time in which it was taken, there are many different types of photographs and they have become increasingly integral to how we live within society therefore an important source in research. Throughout this essay there will be focus on how photographs participate in shaping cultural, social and public understandings of the past.
The discovery of photography was announced in 1839. With …show more content…
Photographs were the starting point for two significant studies carried out by Philippe Aries (1914-1982) of history of childhood and history of death where ‘visual sources’ were equal to written texts and documents. However the use of photographs should not only be used for ‘evidence’ hence the photograph of the ‘Angel Woman’ is not an image that would be used to provide evidence but can be explored in reference to the social and cultural aspect of that …show more content…
However there is an ongoing debate on this issue as many historians believe that photos are constructed therefore reducing the value of photographs as historical sources. The past a photograph portrays is highly distinguished, yet there is an issue, whether an image can actually give evidence of what there is when the photograph is taken. One side of the argument is the naive realist approach where the photograph is approached ‘as transparent’ as it replicates ‘reality’ in that moment in time. ‘This perspective’ Penny states ‘continues to hold considerable sway’ . The implication here is based on the fact that researchers can use photos to look at past events and shape their understandings of the