What is the role of photography as a form of social communication?

Photos often represent the hopes and dreams of the photographer and/or represented: A photographic practice unique to China is the 100 days photo shoot for infants that marks the child's integration as a full family member. Parents will take their children to a professional studio to be dressed up in several different outfits to produce, among other keepsakes, a thick, glass fronted book that presents these photos against fantasy backgrounds and adorned with phrases in many different languages.

Rather than functioning as a commemoration of the fleeting developmental stages of young infants, these books mark, at the point at which children become full family members, the hopes and dreams of the parents (and of society) for that child's future. On the cover of this book, this three-month-old infant is dressed in dress trousers and a shirt and tie. These photographers often have to go to great and ingenious lengths in order to have these infants appear as they are not: sitting upright, holding their heads high and engaging with the photographer and the individual viewer. These photos are a way of playing with the hopes and dreams that parents and society might have for the child as they grow and develop, rather than preserving the conditions of the present.

This role of photography is not simply reserved for young children. Hanging in one of the government buildings in the town was a huge photo of the members of the office, wrapped in warm winter clothes but superimposed and edited on a scene of blue sky and blue sea, with white doves and boats. Text on the photo read, "There is no perfect individual, only the perfect team." Discussing this photo and why I found it interesting with an office member, she said that the practices of superimposing individuals against fantasy backgrounds represented the dreams of the photographed, showing them in places that they would like to visit and scenes that they would like to be in some time in the future.

The goal of photography for people in the town is rarely understood as being to represent everyday existence, but rather as an inspiration for something better for the viewers and a subtext that through the staging of a photograph and its post-production (whether it is a highly edited green screen photo or simply a group of friends smiling more broadly than in real life) the state of being and emotion represented in the photo might be brought into being through its taking.