Photographic Truth

Lewis Hine is considered to be  a social photographer who not necessarily questioned the idea of what is art, but set out to document the life (working and living conditions) of the United States working class society of the early 1900’s. Hine became a teacher at the Ethical Cultural Society in New York where he encouraged his students to use photography as not only an art but as a way to educate others of what is going on socially around them. Hine was inspired by another well known photographer Jacob Riis, whose motive was in a sense to shock the audience of the crimes that were in the city of New York at the time.

This essay, describes different photography scenes and gives a scenario for each image. Hine begins to describe an image of a group of people huddled under the Brooklyn Bridge at 3 in the morning, Hine proceeds to ask where is the power in a picture, then later he says that the picture brings a sense of reality to the reader. Basically, Hine asks where does the reality lie, and how do we know that this image portrays a true reality. Since the image setting has already been altered, it adds an extra sense of reality to the image produced. Hine makes the point that  “...the average person believes implicitly that the photograph cannot falsify”, because they do not know what happens behind the scenes before the photograph is taken (Hine, 111).

I believe this image is a perfect example of photographic truth because if you were in Russia at the time, you would believe that the second image holds more truth than the one above, especially if it was circulated more than the one above, and more recent. The picture above is the original image( taken on the 2 year anniversary of the October Revolution 1919), and the image below was edited as propaganda by the Lenin administration. The image below has taken out a few important people like Trotsky after he had fell from power.