Blog Post: Justin Iwata

The very purpose of our class is to study how photography can evoke social change. Looking to Jim Hubbard’s Shooting Back, to Zana Brisk’s Born in the Brothels, and PBS’ Bad Voodoo, we can see the power and potential of participatory photography. How photos are utilized to create the change they were produced for has been the focus of another one of my classes Image and Image Management.

Image managers understand that images are synthetic, ambiguous, and that the more an image is reproduced the more “true” it becomes. Sontag also understood this as she wrote “Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision” (p. 52). In this way, the images of a place become the reality. Technological advancements like Photoshop and the internet have facilitated this process. Photoshop allows pictures to be altered then sent worldwide instantly. Image managers then chose images that are simple, evocative, and believable to shape the news and public opinion.

When Kodak produced its first sales pitch “you press the button, we do the rest,” I never understood who the “we” were until I took Image and Image Management. I now realize that the “we” are image managers, who reproduce, modulate, and manipulate the images that we are flooded with. This process is often used for social change, whether it is beneficial or harmful change is difficult to say.

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