Why is Photography Important?

Photography has been around since 1826, when French inventor Joseph Nicephore Niepce became the first person to produce a permanent photograph; photography has since become one of the most popular cultural practises this century (Hirsch, 1999).

Photography is “the act of recording images on sensitized material by the action of light” (here). The act of recording events and information is important for historical and cultural reasons.

Documenting society is essential for present and future peoples to better understand the past. Not only is photography important for cultural reasons, but it plays an important part in keeping alive, maintaining, and creating personal and social relations. Common beliefs aided in the shaping of traditional family roles in communities, men were the supporters of the family while woman stayed at home to care for the children; traditional pre modernisation family values (Giddens, 1991, p84). As a result of strong family and social values, photographs and cultural behaviours converged into social practices such as the taking of the family portrait to safeguard family heritage, photo albums, and photography as a craft. By drawing on these examples of behaviours, we can see how important photography is socially and culturally, and how it has become an inherited part of society as it reinforces traditional ideas of community.

In a digital world, portable cameras enable people to create and maintain instant social relations through an array of computer mediated communication platforms. This is not only reinforcement as to how important photography is, but how integrated the behaviour of taking a photo has become in mainstream culture. For example, while traditional photo albums were one item shared with many, uploading photos online means that one digital album can be shared with multiple people at one time with the bonus of having twenty-four-hours access to your photographs.

Photography has been around for almost two hundred years and has evolved with communities as technology has advanced. The recording of images it is an important and unavoidable part of the twentieth century.
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References

Hirsch, R. (1999) Seizing the Light: A History of Photography. New York: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages.

Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern age. U.S.A.: Stanford University Press.