The Myth of Photographic Truth

The reading was very interesting. The beginning story about the photograph by Weegee (Arthur Felig), The First Murder, is a very good example of the practices of looking. Capturing in a moment, the facial expressions of what these people seen and feel while experiencing a murder. The photo captures many emotions and can tell a story with just a title. Also, the picture of Emmett Till in his casket bearing the signs of his brutal murder tell a much more graphic picture than what we ready about the actual story.
The definition of representation referring to the use of both languages and images to create meaning about the world around us shows that looking at something and hearing it go together hand in hand.
The myth of photographic truth basically represents the question is the photograph really real? Is it a picture of what is really happening in that very moment or something that is set up? In the photo by Cindy Sherman do we ask ourselves when we first see the picture we would think is the woman really dead or alive? Is this photograph set up to make us think that she’s dead or is she alive? How do we really know? Even though a photograph is taken at a time when something was possibly true doesn’t mean that when we view it, it still is. There is a lot that a photographer can do to alter an image, make it unrealistic, take something out of a background or add it.
Theorist Roland Barthes uses the term myth in many different ways. He says that the photograph, unlike a drawing, offers a difference between what is here now, the image, and what was there then meaning the referent, or object, thing or place. He also talks about the truth-value of photography and what it does for the courtroom for instance does a photo used for evidence hold any weight really in the courtroom? How do we know if the evidence is really real?
Barthes also stated that photographs are also objects in which we invest deep emotional content. We take an emotion to what we see. Photographs are past moments stopped in time. Photographs can either be objective or truthful records of events. Barthes also said that there is no such thing as a purely denotative image, that connotative meanings are particularly useful in examining notions of photographic truth.