Photojournalism Gets Serious About Digital Media

Photojournalists frequently indulge in nostalgia for job security that probably never was by launching attacks at digital media and the internet for destroying a fabled golden age of photojournalism. In the face of this anxiety, the Spring 2010 Nieman Report on Visual Journalism has assemble a lucid and motivating set of articles that shift the focus of the conversation.

Photojournalism is changing, propelled by newsroom budget cuts, multimedia possibilities, and the ubiquity of digital images. In Visual Journalism, photojournalists write about emerging digital business strategies and their efforts to expand the reach of their photographs online and on gallery walls.

In college, I left a photography program for a design and technology program. The photo curriculum was clearly outdated, and too few people were doing anything about it.  The Nieman Report on Visual Journalism is an inspirational reminder that many photographers, editors, and critics are seriously engaging with digital media and all the changes that digital is bringing to media in general. In the articles, they propose strategies and take their colleagues to task for the missed opportunities.

Here are some highlights:

Failing to Harness the Web’s Visual Promise by Fred Ritchin

That journalism failed to move beyond the limited repurposing of the print and broadcast media and into the welcoming territory I wrote about—into places with an expanded sense of possibility—is beyond dispute. In part, this is because dissimilarities between digital and analog media weren’t taken seriously. Instead, repeatedly and almost universally we attempted to put what we’d previously done onto a screen-based template while marveling at the new efficiencies of the digital and simultaneously giving away our work for free. If this were Greek mythology, we—the know-it-alls in the journalism community—would be portrayed as having been devoured by a seductively ephemeral Web, not realizing it was much more than simply a substitute for “dead trees.”

What Crisis? by Stephen Mayes

There is talk about a crisis in journalism, which generally takes the form of angst-ridden journalists, editors and news folk in general asking, “How do we maintain the commercial status quo without which journalism as we know it will be gone?” The question is sincere and extends beyond the fear of losing jobs; there is a genuine concern that the investigative and informative roles of the news media will be lost with a high cost to the civic health of our society.

Interestingly, it’s not a question that I have heard asked by many consumers of news who are finding all the information they want in the online environment—and more. For those of us in journalism, we’re asking it way too late, since a crisis of news communication has been with us for many years, if not decades. From where I sit—as director of VII Photo Agency, a small agency founded in 2001 by leading photojournalists—this digital shakedown offers an opportunity to correct some of the deep problems that have bedeviled the business of print journalism—and gone unchallenged—for too long.

Photojournalism in the New Media Economy by David Campbell

The successful visual journalist in the new media economy is going to be someone who embraces the logic of the Web’s ecology. This will mean using the ease of publication and circulation to construct and connect with a community of interest around their projects and practice. Photographers who understand they are publishers as well as producers, for whom engaging a loyal community is more valuable than chasing a mass audience, will be in a powerful position. They will be the ones who use social media in combination with traditional tools to activate partnerships with other interested parties to fund their stories, host their stories, circulate their stories, and engage with their stories.

A New Focus: Adjusting to Viewers’ Increasing Sophistication About Images by Jörg M. Colberg

At a time when many photojournalists are remaking their lives to fit their work into changing business models, it is difficult to raise the topic of how much their visual language also needs to change. Yet, to my mind—as a critic and curator who deals mostly with fine art photography—these two challenges are intertwined. Success will probably not happen in one unless progress is made in the other. No longer can photojournalists afford to rely on clichés, exemplified by predictable poses of weeping mothers and of starving children staring off into the distance, of soldiers cradling their fallen companions, or the countless others each of us can bring to mind. It is important to realize that each of these stories is still in need of telling, but the hoped-for connection between journalist and viewer is not likely to happen anymore in conventional ways.

Perhaps coolest of all, photographer Marcus Bleasdale is collaborating with comic artist Paul O’Connell to turn his photographs of gold and diamond mines in the Congo into a comic strip.  Through my internship at the Open Society Institute, I became familiar with the amazing impact Bleasdale has made with his photographs, which he details in The Impact of Images: First, They Must Be Seen:

In our attempt to bring this story to the attention of these international gold traders, Human Rights Watch and I worked together to create an exhibit of my mining photographs in Geneva, Switzerland, where Metalor Technologies, one of the leading gold mining companies, has its corporate offices. We invited to the exhibit’s opening night gold buyers and mining company executives as well as financiers, stockholders and journalists. Immediately after seeing this exhibit, Metalor Technologies halted its purchases of Congolese gold.

This success has only been Bleasdale’s starting point for making innovative use of his photographs.  This new step to comic book form is exciting, especially because it has indirectly gotten Bleasedale thinking about videogames as a possible format as well.

Image from Nieman Report site. "Comic artist Paul O'Connell transformed Marcus Bleasdale's photographs of exploitation in the Congo so that his message could reach a new audience."

There is a clear focus on repurposing the work to reach specific audiences.  It’s hard to imagine a photographer working this way during the fabled golden age of photojournalism, when magazines had large circulations and published many photo essays.  I doubt that that audience was as easy to move as we like to think in retrospect.  Digital media has made it impossible to ignore changes in the media that were well underway before the internet became popular.  Enough whining, and let’s get on with it.  The possibilities are too exciting to ignore.