Can Photographs Change the World?

      I believe that photographs can definitely change the world. Photographs are very powerful. In a Forbes article Rahim Kanani said, “Photographs have the power to become icons, and to stay in people’s minds for their entire lifetime.”  Photographs are just as important as words and maybe even more important in some insistence's. Professor Nordell said, “ a photo is worth a thousand words.”  I completely agree with this because photographs are able to show you things that would be very hard to describe with words. Rahim Kanani also said, “Photographs are a shortcut to communicating quickly, and they reach people on an emotional level as few other things do.”   Photographs have the ability to tell a story without using any words.

                I think that the photo below really changed the world. This photo is of astronaut Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon. This was a huge accomplishment that I believe changed the world in many ways. This photo proves that there is more out their in the universe. This photo showed us something that we would have never been able to see. Without this photo we only would have had the astronauts account of what they saw. This photograph gave us the ability to feel as if we where also on this mission. This photo in my opinion changed how we thought about the universe and this photo made people curios about outer space. This also brought the country together because the first person walk on the moon was an American.

Photo by- NASA
Image Source- http://www.citizen-times.com/story/local/2014/07/17/legacies-apollo-years-moon-landing/12802617/


                Photographs have the ability to impact lots of people. The video in the content area talks about how Alexander Zemlianichenko took a photo of Boris Yeltsin dancing (Photo Below). Boris Yeltsin was President of Russia. This photo helped him to get reelected because it showed the people of Russia that Boris was healthy and strong enough to serve another term.   This photo did more than words could describe because people were able to see Boris dancing around for themselves.

         

Photo By- Alexander Zemlianichenko
Image Source- http://www.pulitzer.org/works/1997-Feature-Photography

                  Since photographs can be so powerful, people sometimes don't want them to get out to the public. This is called censorship. It is not very hard for photographs to not get published by large media outlets. Ashley Lutz from the Business Insider said “6 corporations control 90% of the media in America.” This makes easy for the large media outlets to control what gets to the public. Large media outlets are not the only way that photographs can get out.  Social media is huge and is a great tool to get things out to large numbers of people. Dan Gillmor talked about how instrumental cell phone cameras and social media was in the Ferguson incident. These people are called citizen journalists and they are very powerful most use social media to share there photos and videos.

   

                  The photo below of Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston is a very powerful photo. The photo was taken after Ali knocked Sonny out with one punch. I have always really liked this picture and it was the first photo that came to my mind. This photo shows proves that anything can happen and that we should not underestimate others. This photo is an iconic sports photo. This photo makes me believe that if I work hard enough no matter how impossible a goal seems I can succeed and reach my goal.

Photo By- Neil Leifer
Image Source- http://www.blizter.com/muhammad-ali-2