Photographs can be both true, fiction, or both at the same time. It depends on a lot of things including it’s intention, result of the photo, and if editing was done to the photo. You can take a picture with good intention but then the photo may still portray a story that isn’t necessarily true, making the photo true and yet the meaning that people take away from it, fiction. Photos can be fully and purposefully fictitious, usually modeling photos.
I guess you can argue a difference between “true” and “truth” but we use them interchangeably and their meaning is often just inferred with context in most situations. Something may be a lie yet still hold “truth” but, context is usually the divider between those two things.
Of course fiction can contain “truth”, we see it all the time with children stories. The tortoise and the hare, beauty and the beast, humpty dumpty sat on a wall, etc. These are fiction stories but they hold truth in them that we pull out and see how their messages work in our own lives.
You can put anything in a photo caption. The photo caption contains whatever the person who took the photo wants in the caption. It can be details about the picture, an inside joke to someone particular to see, anything at all.
I look at images because I enjoy seeing images. Interacting with people I know and seeing everything around me in life. It’s fun surfing through photos on Instagram and seeing cool pictures people take. I also like to post my own pictures from time to time and I assume people look at them the same reason I look at their photos, it’s a commonly nice gesture to like someone’s photo and fun to see what other people do with their life.
Most often I don’t like photos for the quality of the picture or me actually liking what the picture is of. I usually just like photos because it’s a nice thing to do for others. When you have a friend and they post a picture, the only time I wouldn’t like the picture is if it was of something really bad I didn’t want to be associated with liking. Other than that, it’s just something nice we do for friends as a sort of high five, thumbs up, glad to see you enjoying life sorta thing.
I don’t like photos to be liked by the person who took it, I like photos because if the photo is on my feed, it means they’re someone I know and would consider a friend or someone I know that I wouldn’t mind letting see my own posts. I would like anyone’s photo that was on my feed because that’s just what friends do for each other, they support each other.
Sometimes i’ll look at a picture for less than a second, like it, then scroll by. Sometimes I won’t even see the picture, just sort of see it but see who it’s from and then like it because it’s someone I know. Sometimes if the picture is interesting, i’ll stop and look at it longer and then keep scrolling but its never like a “let me study this photo” type thing. It’s just casual scrolling and relaxing while seeing my friends.
I think selfies are fine, I haven’t ever seen someone post a selfie, girl or boy, and thought “ugh, why did they do that” or anything like that at all. Having the confidence to post pictures of yourself is a great thing and I don’t look down on anyone who does it.
The most amazing photograph I’ve ever seen is one of the millions of photos of my girlfriend laughing. My favorite pictures are the ones off guard of her laughing because that’s when she’s doing her real smile and laugh and those are the best photo’s ever.
No, I don’t own a big / real camera, I have a friend who does who takes pics of the group when we go out to events some times because he likes photography but I myself just use my phone.
John Morago's Visual Art Blog 