There’s a photography joke that goes, “If you saw a man drowning and you could either save him or photograph the event… what kind of film would you use?”. While this might be a lighthearted jab at photo-lovers, it also reminds us of a very real dilemma photojournalists are often confronted with — the struggle between doing their job by documenting reality and getting involved in the reality they need to document. The short film above, titled “Moment of Truth – Photographer”, provides a powerful glimpse into the mental and emotional toll wartime photojournalists undoubtedly pay quite often.
If you’re subscribed to the New York Times, you might have noticed some unique-looking war photographs featured as the top story when opening up the paper yesterday. The four photographs were actually iPhone photos taken by NYT photographer Damon Winter in Afghanistan, and processed with the popular app Hipstamatic. Earlier this year AP photographer David Guttenfelder did the same thing in Afghanistan with an iPhone and a Polaroid filter app.
This audio slideshow interview by BagNewsSalon features New York Times contract photographer Michael Kamber, who discusses the issue of military censorship of photographs shot during the Iraq war and how his ability to document the war became more and more limited as time went on. An interesting point he makes is that uncensored photography should be allowed even if it can’t be published immediately, because it can provide posterity with an accurate view into the past.
Making pictures and getting them published have their own set of rules dictated by government, military, publishers and editors. The images made by the photojournalists who covered the war can reveal a gruesome reality beyond what the American media has shown us. “I think that we need to publish those photos for history even if we can’t get them in the newspaper today,” said Kamber.
A warning: the slideshow includes some pretty intense images of war.
[The photographs] appeared to show museum visitors viewing the exhibit.
In fact, the people shown were museum staff members, who were asked by museum officials to be present in the galleries to provide scale and context for the photographs. The photographer acknowledged using the same procedure in other cases when an exhibition was not yet opened to the public.
Such staging of news pictures violates The Times’s standards and the photographs should not have been published. (While pictures may show previews or similar situations before an exhibition opens, readers should not be given a misleading impression about the circumstances.)
One of the photographs is shown above. Basically the photos showed museum staffers as visitors without indicating so in the captions. The comments over at PDNPulse are pretty interesting, with some commenters arguing that this isn’t such a big deal, while others claim that this undermines the credibility of photojournalism.
What was supposed to be a routine press preview of the Turner Prize exhibition in London turned a two-hour standoff between photographers and Tate Britain gallery contract-wavers.
Press photographers refused to sign a problematic form at the door that required them to guarantee their images would not “result in any adverse publicity” for the host gallery and reportedly signed away permission sans-royalties for gallery publicity.
Instead of securing a monopoly over the favorable images produced at the event, the gallery succeeded in the opposite, mucking up press relations in a very public way. Read the rest of this entry »
English soccer (football) club Southampton F.C. revealed a plan last week to deny press accreditation for photojournalists this season, and instead to force publications to purchase photographs from a single approved source, a photo agency called The Digital South.
Needless to say, this didn’t go over well with newspapers, and one in particular — The Plymouth Herald — came up with a creative way to protest the decision. Rather than purchase approved photographs, they commissioned city historian Chris Robinson to cover a recent match with Argyle using cartoons (reminds us of a criminal trial). Read the rest of this entry »
Newspapers are fading. News media is in a limbo of redefinition. Now we can add photojournalism to that list of defunct media, said Neil Burgess, head of London-based photo agency NB Pictures. Burgess is also the former head of Network Photographers and Magnum Photos, and twice Chairman of World Press Photo, and has spent much of his life working on social documentary photography and 25 years as a photojournalist.
Earlier today, Dallas Morning News photo editor Guy Reynolds noticed a strange relationship between two Getty images of golfer Matt Bettencourt at the Reno-Tahoe Open golf tournament. One photo featured a tight image of the golfer holding up his ball, victorious, after the 11th hole. The other image, vertical, shows the golfer in the same position, but with another person standing in the background, possibly the golfer’s caddy. Initially, Reynolds assumed the photograph was taken by two different photographers, from different angles. However, upon further inspection, Reynolds realized the photo was taken by the same photographer, Marc Feldman, and it appeared that the tighter image was actually altered to omit the second person. Read the rest of this entry »
