Clichés are sometimes true. Here’s one—photographers don’t like to give speeches. At a recent event, photographer Antonin Kratochvil screened slideshows of his work: American soldiers coolly observing the Iraqi distressed and dead; Lebanese militant youths standing restlessly near decaying walls; American evangelicals speaking in tongues. The photographer then clambered onstage, ruddy and scarf-wrapped (“The Bedoins wear them!”) for his talk, but he was no Christopher Hitchens. He hated talking about himself—as uncomfortable in the role of sage as the rest of us would be in a war zone—and he left the stage with half the time for his “speech” unused, encouraging his audience to spend it smoking cigarettes instead. Kratochvil is not alone in his taciturnity. When I recently asked one of the greats of the form for his thoughts, he e-mailed the aphorism: “To live happy, live hidden.”
Perhaps this distrust in the verbal complaint—so loved by windy print journalists—is why we don’t hear so much about the difficulties facing photojournalism, from street corner news photographers to the deans of the eminent agencies Magnum and vii. They’ve been struggling with downsizing, the rise of the amateur, the ubiquity of camera phones, sound-bite-ization, failing magazines (so fewer commissions), and a lack of money in general for the big photo essays that have long been the love of the metaphoric children of Walker Evans. Like print journalists, photographers are scrambling not only to make sense of the new world, but to survive in it intact.
Yet, paradoxically, visual culture is ever more important. It seems that everyone now takes photos and saves them and distributes them, and that all these rivulets supply a great sea of images for editors to use. This carries certain risks. If they are taking snapshots, amateur photographers are likely not developing a story, or...
Complete access to this article will soon be available for purchase. Subscribers will be able to access this article, and the rest of CJR’s magazine archive, for free. Select articles from the last 6 months will remain free for all visitors to CJR.org.
All of us who have been inspired by professional photojournalism mourn the market decline of the profession. But oftentimes, as this essay suggests, pure photojournalism is confused with "art" as an end in itself, and this does not advance the core mission of journalism. The examples of effective citizen photojournalism given here suggests as much. It's fine if a photograph shot in heat of battle or amid personal suffering becomes regarded as an art object, but its foremost importance consists in communicating the event or sources of suffering, and amateur photography sometimes achieves this. Nor does more value necessarily cohere to still images any more than to moving images. It's arrogant to assume so regardless of the assertion that still photos are "objects." That still images are more personal or tend to be remembered more than moving images are subjective assertions at best.
Posted by BD on Sat 26 Jul 2008 at 11:14 AM
Thank you for this thoughtful think piece. As the writer notes, photographers are suffering right along with journalists as the trade goes through tough times now. It would indeed be a shame if we lost the best practitioners in the field.
Posted by Jason Gross on Mon 28 Jul 2008 at 03:25 PM
Your article brings up many important points concerning the future of photography. Having worked in the trenches as both a still photographer and multimedia producer much of what you say rings true. I'm currently struck by the high level of work being done by the new generation of still photographers- the one's just getting out of school. Take a look to see the evidence.
http://www.vervephoto.wordpress.com
Posted by Geoffrey Hiller on Thu 31 Jul 2008 at 02:35 PM