Ninth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

In her seminal book On Photography, Susan Sontag remarks that “Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder—a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.” (Sontag, 2005, 19). This makes it clear that a camera is a gun that may easily manipulate or own anything that is placed in front of it. Photograph, whose real power was not immediately understood at the time of its invention, has come to signify and be construed as one of the most important inventions that humanity has ever created. Commonly accepted due to a craving to believe it as the ‘true’ reflection of reality, photograph forces people to witness and contemplate what is going on around them. The fact that it can easily reach vast numbers of people without any intermediary provides photographs with an immense power in order to impact and direct public opinion through messages that have not been previously intended so or thought of. As such, to borrow her emphatic words again, “photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation and fantasy.” (Sontag, 2005, 17). This paper analyzes several famous examples from all over the world in recent past to unearth how photography shapes our perception unexpectedly in the face of humanitarian crises, wars and invasions and evaluates its propaganda role in these circumstances.