Reflection on Group Presentation: History as a Method
For the Reflection on the Group Presentation, we decided to write the reflection together seeing as we both did the presentation together we thought this would make more sense as it was a group presentation shared between the two of us.
Our group decided to look into how using history as a method for the presentation to analyse photos could be useful. The time period we looked at was the years which the Vietnam War took place. We chose this time frame as many influential photos were taken around that time and had a huge influence on how people viewed the war, particularly in the US. War photos taken by photojournalists and native photographers such as Nick Ut showed raw images about the horrors of war.
We focused on 4 main images that we think had a huge impact on the war. The first was the famous image titled ‘Terror of War’ better known as the ‘Napalm Girl’ taken by vietnamese photographer, Nick Ut who took the photo whilst fleeing the napalm stricken town of Trang Bang. A photo that showed a naked 7 year old girl running out of the town in terror. A photo that showed the true horror of war and the inevitability of civilian casualties.
The second photo that we decided to look at is a photo that was taken by Art Greenspon that depicts an American squadron unit under fire in the middle of the thick Vietnamese jungle. A photo that has been heralded as the greatest photo of the war.
The final two images were in response to the war. The first of the two being a direct reaction from the buddhist monks with the catholic diem persecuting them and restricting how they could express their beliefs. The image simply titled ‘Burning Monk’ was captured by Malcolm Browne shows a protest of monks at a intersection in Saigon.
The final image is of an event in America in direct response to the lack of government intentions to bring the Vietnam War to an end. The Kent State Shooting photo taken by student John Filo shows a dead fellow student that had been shot after the protest turned violent.
The importance of context in all four photos cannot be stressed enough because without it it simply would be near impossible to work out exactly what was happening and how this could have such an impact on the people and arguably change the face of the war as a whole. Whilst we originally looked at just the visual content we realised that we couldn’t determine a huge amount of information from that and even a few images proved to be misleading without the historical context, particularly the one taken by Art Greenspon.
On the whole the two of us believe our presentation went well. The information we had was to the point and concise and it carried across well. My main concerns about the presentation was more the delivery rather than the content, if we were to do it again, it would be useful to practice it thoroughly beforehand. Only other thing I can think to say is that we could of done more research across different mediums, we got very little from books and such and most of out sources were from the internet and documentaries. But we believe that you can never do enough research when analysing images.