9) Documentary Practice, Shawn Sobers - 29/11/17

On Wednesday we had another Photography in Context lecture, all based around documentary photography. My notes from the session can be seen scanned in below.

The part of the lecture I found most engaging was about photojournalism and social documentary. I found it interesting seeing the comparison between the mainstream media and social media, and the positives and negatives to both of them. For instance social media gets news stories out so much quicker than for instance the papers, however its hard to fact check these, and the mainstream media still has the hierarchal upper hand. It's also interesting to see the development of news stories being online, for instance people like VICE. I feel they have a fresher outlook to other news outlets such as the BBC, and have less strict rules and regulations to all the traditional news sources. This also leads me on to another point we talked about, which was embracing the online space more for photography. Jason Evans talks about this in more detail in his essay 'Online Photographic Thinking', which you can read my thought about here. I think it would be interesting to look into exhibiting a photography project in an online format, and it's definitely something to think about for third year.

Overall I found the lecture quite interesting, and it was nice to be able to have a discussion about different types of documentary and see some images that different people had submitted.

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