Photos Don't Tell the Whole Story

Frozen bits of time can be misleading. Plenty of examples throughout history. The before and after are missing. The context is blurry. 

This is seen in photos from Dorothea Lange's series of a family on the road in 1939. 

The picture you pick affects the emotional response of the audience. 

One suggests suffering; the other evokes happiness - check the photos of mother and daughter in the article Truth and Lies in Photography. 

Tim Parkin, the author of the linked article, wrote:

Both of these are a lies to some extent - the first is a lie where the subject has decided to show the photographer that they are happy and have a happy, clean baby (the father cleaned the babies face). The second photograph, the one that was taken first, lies in that it only shows a single aspect of the subjects life having just arrived at a food shelter after a long car journey (I look pretty bad after eight hours in the car too).

Another example may be the famous AP photo from Eddie Adams of a South Vietnamese General executing a Viet Cong fighter with a revolver - graphic image here. 

Total horror! 

But before capture, the murdered guerrilla fighter killed a South Vietnamese officer and his family. 

Dead was the wife. Dead was grandma. Dead were the children.The surviving kid moved later to the US and served in the military. 

During the Tet Offensive of 1968, Nguyen's parents and six siblings were killed at their Saigon-area home by alleged Viet Cong guerrillas. Shot in the arm, thigh, and skull, nine-year-old Nguyen stayed in the house for two hours—while his mother bled to death—and then escaped after dark. News sources from the 2020s reported that one of the men who attacked Nguyen's family was Viet Cong officer Nguyễn Văn Lém, whose execution by Nguyễn Ngọc Loan was famously photographed by Eddie Adams.

Does the new context change the emotions around the horrible picture? 

Even the photographer that took the image once said,

What would you do in this situation under the fog of war and violence?

Nothing is black and white. There is a world in grey. 

Sometimes what we see in a photo doesn't tell the whole picture - go and check Instagram. 

Never react emotionally to first impressions.