Sharjah (Union)
The International Photography Festival “Xposure 2022” hosted Whitney Johnson, Director of Visuals at National Geographic and founder of the Photographic Documentation Project, in a panel discussion entitled “New Voices… New Visions”, during which she spoke about the great role that technological development has played in making Visual stories accessible to everyone, and how content production, presentation and interaction has become amazing and smoother. Johnson went back to the beginning of her speech by remembering the beginning of the nineteenth century when people could only see themselves and their families within the geographical space in which they lived, before The situation is changing in an incredible way, and people can see places that they have hardly heard or read about, so that the audience turns from readers to viewers, and with the dawn of the twentieth century, people were on a date with a technological leap that the most expansive of their imaginations did not expect to live that moment, He sees sights thousands of miles away.
It’s exciting to see stories that transcend yourself, says Johnson. The technology that never stops developing, provides us with the fullest storytelling, and the great diversity of modern media and easy distribution, has made content production and interaction more smooth, and allowed everyone to become a documenter. And conveying a story, which is the same reason that put me in the world of photography, even though I am not a photographer.
She added: We are now living in an advanced level of technological innovation, and this was not easy, and this development allowed us to plunge into the depths of wildlife and fly to the ends of space, and we all have to constantly push the wheel of technology forward to serve art and creativity, and I have been studying pictures for 25 years, and I believe That the fixed image will always continue, with the need not to stop expanding on it, the goal in the sum is to spread awareness for a more deep understanding of the facts so that the image becomes clearer, and the results are more intimate and successful.
And she continued: The image can become tangible evidence, and it has previously contributed to saving thousands of miles of virgin forests around the world, for example, by transmitting influential scenes, and the same applies to the space whose scenes became available before our eyes thanks to the technological development that opened the horizon to our capabilities. , but here it should be noted that this development never cancels the role of the artistic eye of the story teller, with the aim of breaking stereotypes and influencing choices and decisions.
She said: The photographers have succeeded in reaching with their lenses the different corners of the world, without distinguishing between race or color, from a broad perspective that reflects the world in which they convey its details, but there are other contributors to this great work, and I mean here photo editors who form with the photographers integrated and harmonious teams , and together they serve the story, as it is never easy to choose a small number of images from among hundreds of thousands in order to serve the content to be communicated from a large number of content, and there is no doubt that creativity flourishes with diversity.
Johnson said: The speed of capturing content and delivering it to the public has developed incredibly, and everyone can be a publisher, so to speak, but publishing the story is no longer the end goal, but rather has become the starting point for opening the channels of communication between us, and we must not stop imagining and creating to be A well-deserved window overlooking the world, especially since the augmented reality has contributed to the virtual delivery of the audience to the towering peaks and distant depths, and even to other planets.
She concluded her speech by saying: Visual things make us think differently, move our emotions to discover other worlds and new possibilities, and we can reap the result of crystallized images through time on our way to the thresholds of the next discoveries, technology is constantly leading in the direction of new creative paths, and intrinsic values that do not change even if ways change. displayed.