The New Photojournalism
"Photojournalists in the mould of [Robert] Capa or Philip Jones Griffiths can no longer compete with instantaneous TV...photojournalists must find a new language."
The quotes comes from a review of fine art exhibitions in last week's Times of London, but it's a variation on an argument we've heard since the digital camera was invented: now that everyone can take photographs, who needs photographers?
Two events this week seemed to propose two different answers: the unveiling of a $100,000, 18-month project by celebrated photojournalist James Nachtwey, and the news that the United States military will admit the previously-denied deaths of over 30 civilians in an August airstrike in Afghanistan, evidenced, in part, by photographs of bodies taken with a cell phone.
Nachtwey's project (which we blogged about last week) was the result of a high-profile grant from TED. Nachtwey traveled all around the world to produce stunning images of victims of extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis, an intractable strain of TB that kills over 20,000 people each year. The results are intended to spread awareness and were revealed in a slideshow online and on screens on seven continents (yes, there was a screen in Antarctica).
The images taken in Afghanistan, in contrast, were taken on a cheap cell phone camera, and could not be confused with art. In low resolution, they crudely document dead bodies laid out in a mosque following an airstrike against an alleged Taliban compound in Azizabad. The New York Times reported seeing in those cell phone images "at least 11 dead children, some apparently with blast and concussion injuries, among some 30 to 40 bodies laid out in the mosque." Until this week, the American military claimed only 5 to 7 casualties were civilian and over 30 were militants. Devoid of aesthetic attention, formal expertise, or even wide release, the cell phone images nonetheless helped bring about an international outcry that led to a new investigation and a new estimate of over 30 civilian deaths, as the Times reported this week.
The prevalence of photographic technology allows citizens to take on the task of the documentarian; the explosion of online media allows a photographer to display his images in time and in sequence simultaneously across the globe; these are only two of the major changes technology is wreaking in the domain of photography, but they bring with them a host of questions. A few that occur to me:
Did Nachtwey's photographs provide, as he hoped they would, "spectacular proof of the power of news photography in the digital age"?
If the purpose of photojournalism is purely documentary, then what is the distinction between photographs like Nachtwey's and those taken in Azizabad?
What does this distinction imply about the role of the photojournalist and the role of the citizen witness?
How should editors make decisions not only about which images they will use, but how to use them, across all media platforms?
Over the next couple weeks, we'll be asking photojournalists and others to try to answer these questions or propose their own (leave your own questions in the comments), exploring if and how the role of photojournalism is changing. In the meantime, the Dart Center's Self-Study Unit on Photography & Trauma still appears as relevant as ever.