Photojournalism Monday February 27

MOVING ON
We are beginning a unit on photojournalism.
Before proceeding, please go to this site and for the next few minutes, look at the images. Really look. These photos all showed up in news services. Why? What makes them note worthy? Have they anything in common? Quick write/ quiz grade. Answer that question in approximately 100 words an send it along.

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/

Please note the following for a test on Friday March 2. It will consist of explaining the key concepts and terms, plus short reponses to the seven aspects of photography that follow. There is a substantial amount of reading. I suggest you take notes and look at the accompanying images. I'll give you time in class today and tomorrow; however, you will be starting the first part of your photojournalism projects on Wednesday. Make productive use of your time.

Key concepts and terms
• Despite the ease of the technology, taking a good picture – one that is worthy of good journalism – is difficult; it takes both skill and planning.

• Three types of photos dominate photojournalism – 1.establishing shots, 2. midrange shots and 3. close-ups.
See examples at right. Be prepared to identify.

• Pictures can be inaccurate in that they can place information in an inaccurate context; photojournalists must have the same commitment to truth and accuracy that other photojournalists have.

 

• A pen and notebook are as important to the photojournalist as a camera.

 

• Three of the most important elements in making a good photograph are drama, emotion and action.

 

• Mug shot – journalistic slang for a picture of a person’s head and shoulders.

 

• Cropping – in the photo editing process, eliminating unnecessary parts of a photograph.

 

• Scaling – changing the size of a picture to fit into a publication or web site.

 

• Proportionality – maintaining the relationship between the width and depth of a photograph when it is being changed in size; the opposite of proportionality is distortion.

 

• Cutline – the words that explain what is in a photograph. Cutlines are sometimes hard to construct, but they are very important. Photographers do not always have to write the cutlines for their pictures (although they should do so whenever they get the chance). They should gather the information needed for a cutline, including the names (spelled correctly) of the people visible in their photos. This, of course, is not always possible.

• Associated Press policies on electronic handling of photos

The following statement of our policy on electronic handling of photos was issued in 1990, the infancy of high speed photo transmission and digital picture handling. It is as valid today as it was then.

Electronic imaging raised new questions about what is ethical in the process of editing photographs. The question may have been new, but the answers all come from old values.

Simply put, the Associated Press does not alter photographs. Our pictures must always tell the truth.

The computer has become a highly sophisticated photo editing tool. It has taken us out of a chemical darkroom where subtle printing techniques, such as burning and dodging, have long been accepted as journalistically sound. Today these terms are replaced by "image manipulation" and "enhancement." In a time when such broad terms could be misconstrued, we need to set limits and restate some basic tenets.

The content of a photograph will NEVER be changed or manipulated in any way.

Only the established norms of standard photo printing methods such as burning, dodging, toning and cropping are acceptable. Retouching is limited to removal of normal scratches and dust spots.

Serious consideration must always be given in correcting color to ensure honest reproduction of the original. Cases of abnormal color or tonality will be clearly stated in the caption. Color adjustment should always be minimal.

In any instance where a question arises about such issues, consult a senior editor immediately.

The integrity of the AP's photo report is our highest priority. Nothing takes precedence over its credibility.

ART and photography
It was only after the turn of the century that photography began to breach the walls of the gallery and museum world in America, and even then with limited success. Now, however, photographs can sell for six figures — not in the same league as the millions for a Van Gogh painting, but not exactly chump change either — and be presented in fine art museums, not industrial expositions.

The question remains: if photography is an art, what kind of art is it? If we call a specific photograph a work of art does that mean it shows technical excellence? That it reminds us of a particular kind of painting or drawing? Provides a good record of something we regard as beautiful, such as a sunset?
Photographs need not be unique, unlike the Mona Lisa and other paintings, except for daguerreotypes. It's possible to make a lot of copies, so what does rarity mean? (Some photographers are now making "limited editions.") And since photographs can be taken in many ways, what makes one artistic and one ordinary? In the early days of the twentieth century, photographs imitated painting as the way to claim artistic status, modelling a photograph on Whistler's famous painting of his mother, or recording a New York skyscraper with compositional devices learned from Japanese prints and a dreamy softness that removed the image from being confused with an "objective" factual record.


Then along came modernism, and photography eventually caught up, with sharp-focus, and up-to-date notions of subject matter and treatment. Edward Weston's image of a pepper takes something that is familiar and common, isolates it to concentrate attention on it, and through careful lighting and printing makes it look like a monumental sculpture.

Finally . . . along came post-modernism, in the guise of Andy Warhol, who used photographs as the basis for paintings. Many photographers were no longer trying to go out and make pictures "from nature" in the manner of Ansel Adams. Adams, the figure probably most identified with beautiful photographs by the general public, was a man whose ideas about art were essentially ninteenth-century ideas. Post-modern photographers in the late twentieth century appropriated images from other sources such as photojournalism or advertising, or staged their own scenes instead of trying to go out on the streets and capturing "real life." Photography became a tool, and a modern and useful one. Beauty was one thing, "interesting visual images made using photography" was another, maybe. That's where we are today.

In slightly over a century and a half, photography has gone from outsider to insider status, but now the rules of the art game seem to have changed, as "mixed media" (collage and installation art, with photography, painting, and sculpture joined) and "new media" (video and computer) disrupt the old-fashioned divisions into painting, sculpture, and prints and drawings. Photography may be the new kid on the block, but the whole neighborhood is changing fast.

Photography and War

War photography also raises questions about freedom of the press, with government control inevitably at issue. There is always the possibility that censorship by the government and self-censorship by photographers, editors, and publishers, combine to limit what we see about any particular military situation.
The history of the century has been the history of changing versions of the conflict between the government and the press, and changing photographic coverage. In World War I, censorship was heavy, access to the front for photographers was limited, and there were relatively few photographs of actual combat. (Some of the supposed war photographs look staged.) In World War II, for the first time, photographs of American dead were published. After initially being held back by censors, a photo of three American corpses lying on the beach after a landing in the Pacific appeared in Life magazine.
In Korea, the nature of the war ("police action" in official parlance) led to some nasty fighting and, in David Douglas Duncan's famous photographs, a sense of exhaustion rather than triumph. In Vietnam the photos (and television images, both a rival and complement) were more explicit and more shocking: images of a Buddhist monk burning himself to death, a napalmed young girl running down a road, a South Vietnamese general executing a Viet Cong suspect, Vietnamese villagers massacred by U.S. troops at My Lai. All became icons of the war and helped turn public opinion.
The Pentagon and the government learned from what they perceived as a mistake of allowing the medium too much freedom. The press was throttled at Grenada and again during the Gulf War, where photographers were kept away from the combat zone except under tightly controlled conditions. In the Gulf War, virtually no combat photographs were published, so that it was left to images of the aftermath to suggest what had happened — and then a photograph of an incinerated Iraqi soldier caused a controversy because of its graphic revelation.
That picture was a shocking reminder of what actually happened. In a world where the United States public and politicians want only casualty-free wars, the imagery of war is becoming video images showing cruise missiles and plane-launched bombs, along with official shots of the military in effect "on parade," i.e., in controlled, even staged circumstances, and shots — how ironic that term — of refugees, the casualties of war.
In the aftermath of Vietnam, government control of the media in wartime is once again an acute issue. The situation now resembles that during the pre-Vietnam era. The military wishes to strictly limit access and publication; the press insists on the right to see all and show all.
"War photographs" implies more than just pictures of combat: it can refer to military photographs in general, photographs of civilians caught in the middle of conflicts, or images of "the home front." For many people, the photographs of the concentration camps, which came out only after World War II, were too much. These photographs may be the most shocking ever published. After them there could be equally graphic horrors (from Cambodia or Rwanda, for example) but not the initial shock at what human beings had done, or the shock of seeing it presented so unflinchingly in a photograph. As war photography and photographs of other extreme situations such as famines have become increasingly explicit, it has been argued that seeing such images desensitizes people to the horrors and produces "compassion fatigue." Some say that even the special realism the camera brings to the depiction of war can no longer shock, for we have seen too much, and true shock is no longer possible.

Digital Truth
It is true that The National Geographic moved two of the Egyptian pyramids closer together on a cover, to fit the vertical format. And, yes, the cover photo on A Day in the Life of America was manipulated to move the cowboy closer to the moon, again to fit the format.
Does that mean photographic truth is at an end? Who says it ever existed? Photographs have always been manipulated. Usually the results have not been big whopper lies, pictures that claimed something happened when it didn't, but less serious sins, touch-ups in ads and portraits. The tabloids have always used a bag of photographic tricks. In early examples, as when cameras were barred from courtrooms, scenes were staged and images created through cutting and pasting to show what happened. The tabloids still use photographic trickery to turn the fantastic into the supposedly realistic, showing Actor A with Actress B when they never met, or Elvis alive and well in Country C (or on the moon). With the tabloids "Believe it or not" can mean mainly "not"; seeing is not necessarily believing.
When will digital manipulation become a serious problem? We'll see. So far, no digitally manipulated image has provided the occasion for a major crisis in the truth-versus-falsehood department. It may happen tomorrow, or it may never happen as imagined, with someone creating a fake of something important and getting away with it at first, affecting public opinion.
Photography has always been awarded a special status for truthfully recording the world. But that doesn't mean all photographs, all the time. Digital imaging may pose a serious challenge to traditional photographic technology — film, cameras, paper. And it may eventually affect how people view the images they see in newspapers and magazines, or even in family albums. Right now it looks as if the digital effect on photography is more on transmission and handling than on image-creation. There was always darkroom trickery — retouching, double-exposure. It's just that such effects are easier to produce now, and less easy to detect.
The problem is that with digital manipulation of photographic images so simple, a slippery slope is created where minor cleaning up of an image can easily lead to major changes. It is not easy to identify a point where truth is lost and the picture enters the realm of fiction. In a world of images showing the most fantastic, imaginary situations in the most realistic, convincing fashion — think of science-fiction films, or the more exotic kinds of still advertising images — the balance may be shifting between traditional straightforward photographs and more spectacular kinds of images made through digital manipulation. It is possible that audience tastes and our sense of an image's credibility are shifting as well: do we still draw sharp lines between news photographs and the other pictures we see in newspapers and magazines?
There is one other potential problem with digital imagemaking. In the civil trial for the murder of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson, O.J. Simpson cried "fake" when a photo turned up showing him wearing Bruno Magli shoes, the kind responsible for bloody footprints at the crime scene. The contact sheet (apparently) was convincing evidence and proved him wrong. That may be hard proof to come by in the future, when photos on digital cameras leave no tracks, as it were, and certainly no negative. In the past the negative was the key physical record of the photographic act and a guarantee of sorts for photographic truth.
Our sense of the truth to be found in images may be changing because of digital manipulation. But we still are waiting for our first great test case of digital truth, that is, digital lying.

Presidential Image Making
Acting presidential is one thing, appearing presidential can be another, and in the contemporary United States, it is hard to know which is more important.
Of course not all presidential pictures are neat, dull images of handshakes after signing bills into law. For that matter, not all American political pictures are of presidents. Politics is played in many ways, and in many places besides Washington, D.C. There are plenty of photographers — and politicians — to go around, and there are plenty of photos of all kinds besides the standards. Some carefully staged media events backfire: Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis looked silly and out of place, not "presidential," riding around in a tank with an ill-fitting helmet on his head. Some political photos are funny — one or two of them intentionally. Most political photos are totally forgettable, some memorable, and a few key images are totally unforgettable, capturing moments of high drama in ways that provide a shared sense of history for all. When that happens, political life somehow escapes control of the spindoctors and image masters, and manages to recover a sense of immediacy, vitality and significance.

Advertising and Persuasion
By the late ninteenth century, advertisers were already convinced that illustrations sold goods, but the shift to photography came after World War I, during the 1920s as the modern advertising industry exploded. Photographs were thought to be more convincing because of their "realism" and "truthfulness."
Advertising photography created an idealized version of middle-class life that was always white, attractive, happy, and capable of reaching the next rung on the ladder to health, beauty, luxury, and success. In the late 1960s some of the race and gender biases of advertising were at last addressed.
For all of photography's supposed realism and its power to make fantasy credible, the underlying strength of photography in advertisements lies in its ability to glorify — and glamorize — the object. A handful of cigarettes can be made to look like the most beautiful, precious and desirable objects in the world. A car can be presented as the symbol of a "lifestyle," the very object needed to prove one's entrance into the world of the rich, stylish and sexy. Of course, photography can work both ways. It can make cigarettes attractive. But it can also help create images that turn people away from cigarettes, by using fashion-model looks as the lure for an ad that warns against smoking.
It is unlikely that people ever swallowed advertising claims whole. Yet even when an advertising photograph is recognized as a performance, it touches real wishes and anxieties and invites belief or wish fulfillment, at least subliminally. For those in search of identity, advertising offers a kind of pictorial windowshopping. The innumerable images show products that promise to create a new sense of self, and they do so with all the brilliance and conviction photography can offer. Seeing through the photographic sales pitch may not be that difficult — but resisting it can be.











Social Change

In the late ninteenth and early twentieth centuries Jacob Riis, a Danish-born journalist, used photographs to help support his arguments about the need to reform slum life. The title of his most famous work, How the Other Half Lives, remains a simple description of how social photography generally operates, providing a look at the lower classes to awaken the conscience of the middle and upper classes.
Lewis Hine, known for his photographs of child labor, thought that photography could be "a lever for the social uplift." He believed in the realism of photography as a means of providing unquestionable evidence, although he also used accompanying captions and text to give the photographs even more punch by providing telling information.
The photographers of the Farm Security Administration worked for the federal government during the Great Depression of the 1930s. They were hired to photograph the struggles of the rural poor, and the programs designed by the government to provide help. In the end, they provided a complex portrait that went beyond those boundaries, and their work became a model for many later photographers. As images that attempted to rally support for government programs, the FSA photographs — now stored in the Library of Congress — often played on people's sympathies by showing individuals in trouble, and therefore in need of help, but not in such bad shape that aid would not make a difference.












Today, photographers continue to use the camera to win support for social causes: poverty and homelessness, AIDS, the farm crisis, the environment. Sometimes they work independently, sometimes they work as photojournalists, sometimes they work for charitable organizations or government agencies. It has never been easy to find support for social reform photography, or to find outlets where it can be published. But many dedicated photographers are still fired by the belief that if they can show hardship and injustice truthfully, fairly and forcefully, people who see their pictures will be moved to respond.


Cultural Identity
Given the treatment of members of these groups in the past (and present), the stakes are always high when it comes to photographic representation. Where stereotypes are at play, any picture can create a positive image or reinforce a negative one. The stakes are increased when the photographer is white, the subject a person of color, and the audience largely white — and more often than not, that has been the case.

Someone who belongs to a group may have greater personal experience and knowledge of its ways and may elicit a more trusting, open response. Social proximity can lead to a physical and psychological closeness made evident in the photographs. But insider status is no guarantee of pictorial success. The results, as always, depend on the individual photographer and the elements of the specific situation. Partly as a result of ethnic pride movements and a greater concern with the ethical and political issues surrounding the use of photographs, a new wave of photographic work is now being done by members of different ethnic and racial groups, with a full consciousness of what it means to participate in self-representation. Some of the work is photojournalism, intended for publication in newspapers, magazines, and books. Some is art, intended more for presentation in galleries and museums. In either case, the photographers show a heightened awareness of the importance of controlling one's own image and the images that represent one's group.