I didn't understand film until photography.

Praise God for my high school photography class. I understood what Andrew Rudd was talking about in the sense that you can play with the depth of field or have an open frame image. Okay, this was a big deal for me because I do not watch a lot of movies or visual media in general so I was sort of stressed about the whole idea of having to critically analyze film, but I understand photography, so I am not as far behind as I once feared I was. Anyway onto the important part of the post... Photography is such an important form of art that has been effectively used in many forms of media, but especially newspapers and magazines. Certain images have captured the hearts and minds of many in America...I think of the images after 9/11 and the firemen raising a flag above the rubbish, the pictures of the firemen in the Oklahoma City bombing carrying wounded children, Martin Luther King Jr. Standing behind a podium in Washington DC with great strength and dignity, and a young Vietnamese girl running down the road naked after a US napalm strike on Vietnam. It is phenomenal how these images can have such a great effect on society. These images seep into our collective memory and can revolutionize the way we think depending on how the image is constructed. When people in the US think of the Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 attacks they tend to automatically pull up those images of heroic firemen in their heads; there might have been a million other things going on around that site but we automatically key in on the firemen. When we think about Martin Luther King Jr. We think of him behind a podium giving a speech; we don't think of him sitting in his living room or drinking coffee because there are no famous images that show him doing either of those things. When we think of napalm strikes we think of the young Vietnamese girl (Kim Phuc) just because that image is so pervasive in our society. All of this to say, that still shots are hugely important in modern media.