The Power of Photography

Photographs have the power to reveal, to condemn, to celerbrate and to catalyze. How that power has been used and abused is the subject of this book. Photography has created a communal memory bank, shared by all the citizens of the world with access to newspapers, books and magazines. From the first X-ray to the first view of earth from space, photographic images have made a difference in how we perceive our world. Governments have used photographs to spy on their citizens, and citizens have used photographs to reform their governments. Photographs of the concentration camps and the My Lai massacre have made the unbelievable undeniable. Photographs have reinforced fame - Betty Grable as pin-up and Marilyn Monroe as a sex goddess. Photographs have achieved their own status as icons - the raising of the flag in Iwo Jima, the mushroom cloud of the atom bomb, the revolutionary portraits of Chairman Mao and Che Guevara. Photographs can also lie, as they have from the beginning and continue to do with ever greater ease as technology progresses. The significance of these images in particular and of photography in general is examined by Vicki Goldberg.