Assignment 1: Final Reflections

I think for the most part the narratives suggested in Assignment 1 match the narratives of the subjects. I am not certain my captions represent absolute truth about the narratives of the subjects--in some cases I know I emphasized certain aspects of the narrative I perceived. Perhaps the man and the boy playing basketball were just having fun, and weren't really practicing for something in particular. In the case of the second photo, I could point out the presence of a person out-of-frame, which gave that particular narrative a little more to go on than just the couple's charming and somewhat shy reaction to my presence as the photographer. I took an educated guess in one of the pictures where I was trying to be inconspicuous: I do not know if the little girl in the third picture is resting with family or friends. I also made the little girl the main subject of that photograph, whereas I could probably have made the two young women deep in some important conversation talking by the fountain the subject. The narrative of the last three I can say was depicted in a straight-forward manner--it was also the group of people with whom I had the most interaction and can remember the most detail about their meeting as I photographed them.
I think in the end, the difference between photojournalism and snapshot photography derives from the importance of the relationship between the subject and photographer. It seems to me as though in snapshot photography, the subjects themselves impose their own meaning on a scene, or perhaps the situation/environment does so for them, because of the presence of a camera. (The meanings in these cases also seem to be relatively superficial, if we go with the stereotype, or perhaps only accessible to those who personally know the subjects.) In photojournalism, the photographer can impose his own meaning on the scene, or perhaps represent it truly faithfully to its original context, but those decisions will be heavily influenced by the relationship the photographer has to the subjects, rather than the camera, per se.