ABSTRACT
Introduction To what extent then is “tech nic ally good” photo graphy import ant or useful to us in social science research? This is an odd ques tion to ask, espe cially when through out the book I have advoc ated for a degree of tech nical prowess in conduct ing photo graphic research. As Bush (2016) noted of the winning photo graph of the World Press Photo award – much tech nical coher ence was sacri ficed for the sake of the image. Taken by Warren Richardson (2015), the photo graph shows an exhausted refugee passing a child through a mesh of razor wire. Shot at 3am in the morning, with no flash gun for fear of being discovered by patrolling police, Richardson had no choice but to shoot in this way – the image is noisy (ISO 6400) and blurry (camera shake and/or motion blur of 1/5 sec shutter speed on a focal length of 24mm), appear ing to undermine the very things this book purports to call import ant. But this is also proof of tech nical ability – of being able to see photo graph ic ally. The photo graph is tech nic ally both strong and weak – it betrays the diffi culty of the circum stances in which the subject was photo graphed but is also test a ment to the ability of the photo grapher to create and visu ally narrate in such a situ ation. It also shows how studium (Barthes 1981) works – to inform, signify and surprise all at the same time. For those of us who feel that pinprick of emotion when seeing the image, perhaps it is because we can relate to the sacri fices that parents make for their
chil dren; we could also exper i ence what Barthes calls the punctum of a photo graph.
