3. Responses

What has been the response of the photojournalistic community? In large part a feeling that they have been doing what they have been trained for, the right thing, and the problem lies elsewhere - with an uncaring society, low budgets, art directors who too easily sacrifice content for graphics, etc. The problem is rarely seen as being among the photojournalists themselves.

In many ways they are right, of course. Certainly the triumph of television, software such as Photoshop that permits the “decisive moment” to occur anytime an amateur or professional manipulates an image, the new technologies that allow “frame grabbing” from video to create still photos or fixed cameras such as Columbia University’s Omnicamera that can “cover” events without human intervention, threaten the press photographer’s livelihood. And the problems are not confined to photojournalism but are rife throughout the media and society, symptoms of the victory of the market economy and the end of liberalism, to name two of the major contributors. The pointing of a camera at a starving person in such a splintered societal context becomes much more voyeuristic and less empathetic.

But photojournalists and their professional collaborators, the editors and art directors, are not without blame. If one compares the photography of the 1930s - Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, the Farm Security Administration - one finds that there has been minimal innovation in mainstream photojournalism since then. If anything, the initial empathy has hardened behind the more colorful veneer of today’s photography. While advertising photographers who used to simply point a camera at the product have changed their approaches drastically, borrowing from film, exploiting ambiguity, often doing what editorial photography does with more flamboyance and wit, most photojournalists still rely upon the mechanical “objectivity” of the camera to make their points.

I remember, for example, working at Time magazine before the magazine was going all-color (any page could be published in color), so that advertisers could pay for the higher color rates. Of course, this was thought to make it easier for photographers too, who no longer had to shoot with two or three cameras loaded with different films (black-and-white, Ektachrome color film for fast developing, some also with Kodachrome for their own archives). But when editorial photography shifted primarily to color at Time and elsewhere, many advertisers began to revert to black and white seeking greater freedom and impact, a way to contrast their work with the less challenging editorial color photography.