Historian James Krippner challenges us to think about the relationship between society and photography by posing an important question, especially in an age of instant communication.
Professor Krippner asks, "How do photographic images record, reflect, challenge and occasionally even change social relationships of power?"
Borrowing from Erving Goffman's social interactionist perspective, we live in world of social encounters. By extension, a photograph signifies a sort of mediated expressive form of the social encounters we have with others. In a sense, the photograph becomes a proxy for the experience of a specific encounter. The images also shapes our perception and recollection of the encounter.
Wikipedia defines social interactionism as "a dynamic, changing sequence of social actions between individuals (or groups) who modify their actions and reactions according to the actions by their interaction partner(s)."
Photographs have and will continue to be persausive determinants in a society that is increasingly driven by visual reportage. In today's visual culture, social and visual encounters coexist. On the most recent cover of the Atlantic Monthly featuring an essay about how presidents lie, there is an image of President Bush leaning off the page, mouth open, and defiant as ever.
What are we to infer about the relationship between the image of the president, the word "lie" typeset in yellow, and the power of the president? A semiotic analysis of these dennotative elements here, the president's face and the yellow text is quite revealing. Our learned symbolic associations with the color yellow signifying cowardness and shame from a Western perspectives feeds the imagination. The statement is subtle, yet terribly powerful.
The combination of the word "lie" and the large black and white image of the president create a symbolic juxtaposition that constructs a social reality in the mind of viewer. The social encounters we have with one another are informed by what we see and think about. The water cooler chat I have with a colleague about the president's actions may be in some subconscious way be informed by the impression I have from what I look at.