Can photography change the world? Professor James Swensen thinks it just might.
The average internet user is bombarded with tens of thousands of photographs every day. Exorbitant numbers float around about the images in the digital age: Instagram users post 46,000 photos a minute, Facebook users upload 350 million photos a day, humans take a grand total of 1.72 trillion photos every year, and so on. Associate Professor James Swensen (History of Photography) says this results in a paradox: “We are so inundated with photographic imagery that we don’t look.”
But photographs can be powerfully evocative. During a BYU Education Week lecture Swensen gave on Thursday, August 18, he explored cases where photographs quite literally changed the world. The lecture was called “Worth a Thousand Words: Five Photographs That Can Change How We See Our World.”
The photograph shown here is one of a number taken by Lewis Hine depicting child labor toward the end of the Industrial Revolution in the early 1900s. Hine was hired by the National Child Labor Committee to document child labor, a widespread phenomenon at the time. “He’s going to photograph these children,” Swensen says. “He’s going to bring their faces and their situations to light so that not only can they be seen but something can be done.”
Hine worked as a social studies teacher, but early in his career he took up photography to supplement his teaching. He soon recognized the power that photography had, and he determined to use it to sway public opinion on child labor. Hine had to work to support his family as a child himself, so he empathized deeply with the children he photographed. Swensen says, “He not only shows these young children, but he gives them a name. They are not just anonymous or unknown figures, but they are real people. He humanizes these young girls and young boys.”
Hine’s work was far from easy—often he would have to sneak into factories, avoiding factory foremen or supervisors who wanted to prevent images of child labor from circulating. But Hine’s efforts were duly rewarded. “Hine’s work actually moves the needle,” Swensen confirms.
In fact, as a result of his photographs, the public and government could no longer turn a blind eye to the depravity of child labor. This led to laws against it during the Progressive reform movement, ultimately culminating in the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, in which the federal government outlawed child labor completely.
At that point, Swensen’s discussion came sharply back to the present, where he critiqued current interactions with visual media. Hine’s photography resulted in real and practical change. But little photography we see in our own lives seems to have such a profound effect—whether personally or societally. Our eyes tend to glaze over when we scroll through the deluge of social media photos and advertisements. How can we reform our relationship with photography to see it as the powerful tool and art form it is?
Swensen says the first step is to slow down and “consider the images that we are seeing. We blindly accept these things, but we should stop and think about what they are, where they are from, who made them, what kinds of choices went into those photographs. There are those handful that we should slow down and think about and scrutinize.”
We also ought to exercise some wariness in interacting with photographs and be slow to accept what they seem to depict as the truth. “They are not completely objective things,” Swensen says. “It behooves us to understand what photographs are, what they do, because we trust photographs.” Doctored images are becoming increasingly commonplace—and increasingly convincing—but that doesn’t mean we are at the mercy of anyone with Photoshop. A little research can go a long way, Swensen says: “It’s good to do a little detective work, to ask, ‘Is this really what it’s saying that it is?’”
Practicing this conscious interaction with such a commonplace media can affect not only how we see the world but how we participate in the world. “What I love about photography is that it not only helps us see but helps us act. It propels us to do something,” Swensen concludes.