A Picture Paints a Thousand Questions - the current state of photo(journalism)
This wasn’t meant to be the first post in my new blog, but my mind is still reeling from a fascinating talk I went to last night, organised by the lovely people at PHOTO CAFÉ in Birmingham and hosted at 1000 Trades Bar & Kitchen in the Jewellery Quarter. Duckrabbit’s Benjamin Chesterton gave a very passionate and provocative talk that included a look at current trends within photojournalism and where it may be crossing (if not jumping over) the line.
I don’t want to try and represent Benjamin’s points as they are his to make (and well he made them), but they were a powerful and necessary challenge to a self-regulated industry that to many appears to have very little interest in undertaking this responsibility. I came away from the event with a few topics I needed to explore further in my mind and by bashing away at my keyboard.
A picture paints a thousand words… but actually it doesn’t really
Documentary photography or photojournalism is often lauded for it’s ability to ‘tell a story’ or ‘give people a voice’, a fallacy made clear to anyone who looks at an image without any words or sound to offer context. Benjamin presented an image of a black woman, lying on a bed in discomfort, with a white woman on the edge of the frame whose hand gently rested upon the black woman’s stomach. The photograph did not tell a story, there was no start middle or end, no clear motivation and certainly no lesson to be learned from it alone.
Benjamin asked us to guess the context, the circumstance and the location. Interestingly, he mentioned the cultural significance of the colours in the black woman's clothing, colours that are often lost by the creative decision to print a black and white image. I understood the sentiment Benjamin offered as it’s something I have always felt with documentary photography. A single moment asks more questions than it answers, alone it cannot have a context apart from the one implied by the viewer. To me a picture has never painted a thousand words, merely a thousand questions.
For me this issue feels exacerbated by the currency our culture gives a single image. We applaud in isolation a decisive moment that tells us nothing more than once upon a time these people stood in this place in front of this photographer. Yes it is a document of sorts, but it might as well be a list of names because it tells us nothing of the players motivations, actions and ultimately there consequences. But all the more troubling is the fact that photojournalism appears decoupled from actual journalism, offering cash prizes that celebrate an image but not what we can learn from it (more on the cash later).
Photography, the force for change… ish
I would contend that what photography offers is a face rather than a voice and in some ways this can be as moving and powerful, someone to relate to.
As the number of women accusing Bill Cosby of rape went into double figures it still seemed easy enough for Cosby, his defence team and so-called journalists to dismiss them. In July 2015, when the New Yorker magazine printed an image of the 35 women who had come forward, it wasn’t so easy to dismiss. We had a face and a name, we had 35 of them, together, no longer afraid to tell their story.
Whenever I see Nick Ut’s photograph of 9-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phúc crying in pain from Napalm burns, it reminds me that his is not a job I can do but that it’s such an important one. The photograph may not have ended the war but it certainly influenced public opinion and diminished the US military’s appetite to continue. Just as importantly though, it showed the devastating effect such weapons had on people, children, with faces and names. Without the proof of their faces would the military have confirmed the civilian casualties or would anyone have cared?
Cynical politicians across Europe were forced to confront their lack of empathy when newspapers printed the image of a lifeless child refugee washed up on the shores of Bodrum, Turkey. We learned his name was Aylan Kurdi, a three year-old Syrian boy, we would see his face and it wouldn’t change a fucking thing. The photograph of Aylan that was printed in so many newspapers twists my core into an anguish and rage I can’t describe but perhaps all the more so because it should have made a difference and it didn’t.
A few months ago I had the privilege of listening to the double Pulitzer prize-winning Australian photojournalist Daniel Berehulak talk about his work. What he impressed upon me in his presentation is how his images alone don’t tell the full story and must be accompanied by good writing. Words will give the context and provide the facts to the situation and the images make it ‘real’. Daniel earned his second Pulitzer for covering a crackdown on drugs in the Philippines, instigated by its President Rodrigo Duterte, that saw vigilanteism and police brutality taken to a murderous extreme.
Many of the crime scenes he attended and witnesses he spoke to contradicted the police versions of what had taken place. Then President-elect Donald Trump congratulated the Philippine President on his successful war on drugs, as if Fake News could smell its own. As has been the case throughout Trump’s presidency, it is dedicated photojournalists that have shown the reality behind the lies of the country’s leader. And in Berehulak’s work in the Philippines I think it’s fair to say that he gave a voice to those alive and dead that were victims of this violence, telling a truth that would otherwise be unknown.
To assume every bit of journalism will change the world I know is naive. It’s probably also fair to say that not everyone calling themselves a photojournalist enters the field for entirely altruistic purposes. But I fear many of the issues in current photojournalism are more the result of the attention deficit culture we live in and dare I say the ‘market’ that exists for their work.
Exploit, Package, Sell
Most days I am confronted with further evidence that as individuals we are all capable of great intelligence, but as a collective we can never exceed the lowest denominator. Our culture evolves to extremes so where once we’d have paramedics outside the cinema because The Exorcist was showing and now the film is more likely to be used as a drinking game at a house party (this exists, ask the google). Once something is popular we want to replicate, syndicate and update until it’s exhausted and replaced by something new. It’s no wonder the current aspiring photojournalists aren’t seeking the next big story, they’re seeking the next level of entertainment because that’s what pays the bills.
Year on year there has been a decline in the number of staff photographers at newspapers, the rates they pay to freelancers reduced but still the ravenous expectation of images for consumption remains. While sensationalism, violence and misery sells advertising space the financial reward can only lead to poor behaviour. The story without due diligence, without consideration of impact, without permission and in some cases without truth. While photographers themselves may feel exploited financially, they are more likely to exploit others for their work.
Perhaps it’s too much to liken a photojournalist to the plague on society that is Paparazzi, but then how many telephoto lenses do we expect to turn up to the next royal wedding? Surely more than just the aforementioned scourge. And dwelling for a moment on the Paps, it’s hard to ignore that they continue to exist because there is a demand for what they do. Rags you wouldn’t want to wrap your chips in call themselves newspapers and claim their photojournalism is ‘in the public interest’ when sadly it is just interesting to (some of) the public. Is this any different to awards bodies that offer prizes to photojournalists for work showing graphic child rape? Should we be surprised when they use these same graphic images to promote themselves? I think the answer is no, we should not be surprised but that shouldn’t stop us from being angry.
We shouldn’t repress the righteous anger that permeated through Benjamin’s talk because without it things simply won’t change, how could they? In the nostalgic way I think of journalism as the government-toppling drive for social change, I think that standards can only be imposed if there are those brave enough to call bullshit and start a dialogue. Whether it will change anything who knows, but it seems clear what happens otherwise.
