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.