After seeing the pain in the boys face I jumped to the other children's faces and looked on in horror wondering what was happening that they were running from. After reading a few lines I learned that the children were fleeing from a napalm bomb that had just been dropped. This is something that in unrecognizable to me. To have so much fear and to be running to save your life is something I have never come close to experiencing. Their faces, they are so hard to look at yet completely captured me.
Next I moved on to the soldiers and this is where I found my punctum. None of the soldiers faces are visible. Why? The children are running and screaming and their faces came out clear as day, yet the soldiers who look like they are calmly walking behind the children have no faces. This bothered me. The soldiers seem to be very important in this photo like they are protecting the children and telling them where to go. To me whether the blurred faces were on purpose or accidentally it signifies so much more. Military come together as a unit, as a team. The blurred faces symbolizes how the soldiers are not individuals but a force coming together and protecting these children as one. This is only based on my on conclusions of this photo and how I forced myself to come to a conclusion for the men having blurred faces. It had just struck me so odd, that I could not get over it. This is why I believe this blurred faces to be the punctum in this photo.
Work Cited
Hacking, Juliet. Photography: The Whole Story. Munich: Prestel, 2012. Print.