What are some of the different roles of photography?
There's no need to be technically confident and have an eye for composition if you don't also understand why you're taking the picture.
However, the objective can be simpler—a record of something or someone for identification purposes. For example, it can be more ambiguous – a subjective image putting on top of the notion of security, happiness, or threat. There is a tremendous danger with the photograph that you install your equipment and occupied yourself with concentration, exposure, and composition, but just think about the significance of your image and why you should show the subject in that way.
People take photos for a variety of reasons. Most regions are reminiscent of vacations, or family and relatives. They perform one of the most precious social functions of photography, moments of frost in our history to be remembered in the years to come.
Sometimes pictures are taken to show challenging human conditions and thus appeal to the consciousness of others. Here you may have to investigate the topic in a manner that in other circumstances would be called indiscretion or voyeurism. This difficult relationship with the subject must be overcome if your final image is to gain a positive response from the spectator.
Understanding the topic's best approach to creating the right response for your target audience is also vital in photos that advertise and sell. Every detail of an installation situation must be taken into consideration with the message in mind. Is there a type of place or background that consumers identify with positively? Are the mannequins and the clothes they wear too top of the range? Accessories and accessories should be suitable for the lifestyle and atmosphere you are trying to transmit.
Generally, viewers need to be presented with a picture of themselves made more attractive by the product or service you are trying to sell. Amid this whole fantasy, you need to produce.
A structured table to capture attention; show the product; maybe make room for the lettering and adapt to the proportions of the magazine page on which it will eventually be printed.
The new images are not the same. Here, you often must encapsulate an event into what will be a last released plan. The time of expression or action should summarize the situation, even if you can color your relationship by choosing what, when, and from which you shoot. Until recently, photographers had long been assumed to be neutral observers, documenting events as they unfolded. The situation is somewhat different because no one can be completely impartial.
Photography has its own beliefs and prejudices.
Photograph a protest from behind a police line and you can show threatening crowds; photograph in front of the crowd and show you law enforcement authorities. You have a similar power when you paint a politician's or a sportsman's face, for example. The expression of someone can change between sadness, joy, boredom, preoccupation, arrogance, etc., all in a matter of minutes.
By photographing only one of these moments and labeling it with a caption signaling the event, it is not difficult to tinker with the truth, therefore, it is the responsibility of the photographer to recognize their own beliefs and prejudices.
Photography can provide information about the type of images used for education, medicine, and various forms of scientific evidence. However, once again, the history of photography is filled with examples of "science" images manipulated to prove the photographer's beliefs.
Some photographs at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, for example, were used to prove that human traits were defined by an individual's facial features, and criminals, homosexuals, the sick, and the mentally ill have been subjected to the prevailing gaze of the photographic lens.
The objective was to identify them easily and to transfer them from society to one form of institution or some other, and they would then be left with a «pure» race.
Today, there are still some kinds of photography that are based on differences, often visitors photographing in exotic places on vacation – the cute little Indian mendicant or an African tribe – or even closer to home, the homeless.
These and several other subjects, such as windows and doors, forms of decomposition such as cemeteries, junkyards, and even graffiti, enthuse the photographer for one reason or another.
As someone new to photography, you will have to negotiate your way through the evidence and figure out how you can set why you are taking pictures.
On the other hand, fully ornamental photographs for calendars or editorial illustrations can communicate beauty to itself – the beauty of the landscape, human beauty, natural form, or beauty seen in ordinary and daily things. Beauty is a highly subjective quality, affected by behavior and experience. But there is a margin here for how you see and respond to be shown through a photograph that produces a similar response in others. Oversized, she easily becomes «cute» and contemptuous, overworked, clichéd, and self-conscious.
Photographs are not always designed for communication with others, however; perhaps you seek to flourish and express yourself, and it can be a matter of indifference to you if other people read information or messages in your results - or even look at them.
Some of the most original images of photography were produced in this way, completely free from commercial or artistic agreements, often the result of a personal and private obsession.
There are many more roles that photography can play: a mixture of fact and fiction, art and science, and communication and non-communication.
Photography has played a prominent role in the definition of certain artistic movements, like surrealism where a play on the actual or supposed objective nature of the photograph is used for a surprising effect.
Also, remember that photography is not necessarily the last link in the chain between the subject and the spectator. Publishers, art publishers, and exhibitors all like to impose their own will on the final presentation.