Rowan; "Photos don't change the world the way we want them to"

During a lecture Rowan said "Photos don't change the world the way we want them to". I wrote this down in my book and circled it to make sure I would write a blog post about it.

Before I started taking an interest in photography I want to do something with my life that changed things for the good, I wasn't really sure what or how I was going to do that but I know that there are so many things in the world that need to be changed and I wanted to try and do it, not all of it but just some things that could maybe make a difference. When I started going down the route of photography I still wanted to try and make some sort of a change for the good and maybe it was me being young, I thought that maybe through photography I would be able to make a change. When Rowan said this I knew it was true but I felt a little disheartened. Photos don't change the world the way we want them to. So many photojournalist come back with photos of war and famine, to begin with when these photos would make the news, people probably did want things to change, the photos they were looking at were horrible and they wanted to do something about it. But now we see so many of these photos from a day to day basis we have grown numb of it, we aren't shocked by what we see any more and even when we are it only lasts few a moment or at best a few days. So many worse photos are floating around on the internet of dead people, animal and child cruelty and more and the problem is we can't really do much about it. When we see a horrid photo we can think it as horrible and really wish we hadn't seen it and have the intention to want to stop it, but don't know where these photos have been taken or who has taken them, they are just random images. But as the internet continues to grow so vast everyday more and more things are uploaded and more and more people are seeing them, they are most likely just making us numb to the horrors in this world than giving the motivation to try and change the world.

Even thought Rowan is 100% right I think that we should not give up on trying to change the world with our art, out photos and our creations, we should just keep trying to find new and better ways to make a change.