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Ritchin Chapter 7 and 8

 Ritchin discusses the photograph not as a reporter, but a recorder as well as the possibilities of collaboration that come with the web and instant view on the back of a digital camera. Amateur photographers come into the process as collaborators as well through their feedback and their ability to navigate the narrative that they are presented with.  As the web opens the doors for self-publication, it also allows for amateurs to carry a voice and depict things through their own perspective, it opens the door for interesting things to happen. Amateurs have the advantage of depicting their culture from within verses being a hired professional from a journalistic background that can never fully penetrate the true culture.  Professionals are also constrained by the limits of their assignments; even their formal education can be a limiting factor. Photography’s emergence as an art form was inevitably met with much skepticism but gained credibility when it became a useful avenue for eyewitness accounts. Cell phone cameras and instant web uploading also aided in providing new possibilities for knowing and responding to the world.

Ritchin Chapter 8 Dives into the role of the amateur a bit deeper but it also discusses the role of the camera in a journalistic realm. How does the presence of a camera change the situation that it is there to depict? He exemplifies the $500,000 that was spent to air-condition an outdoor press conference between the U.S., Egypt, Israeli, and Palestinian politicians so that they wouldn’t appear to be sweating in photos. Ritchin also outlines the possibilities that emerge from the use of digital and cell phone cameras. As I mentioned above, cameras encourage the staging and manipulation of reality, including the possibility to manipulate the future through depicting events that foreshadow etc. Ritchin tends to repeat himself quite a bit and these two chapters really blend together. I am stricken, however, by the significant differences and possibilities between digital and analogue photography in terms of public participation. It almost becomes a completely distinct medium. Analogue does possess some of the same possibilities to be uploaded onto the web after scanning etc. but it is much more time consuming and expensive. With analogue, instantaneous feedback is not possible.

ICE 7

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