Photojournalism and its learned conventions

Is photojournalism hindered in its development by its content conventions?

Or is the truth simply suffering from the lack of a big picture, which is missing due to buzzword reporting?
“We see on our front pages only facsimiles of 90-year-old Leica versions of photos,” writes Donald Weber from VII in his essay on photojournalism today. He complains that after the big technological step with the Leica 90 years ago and how Cartier-Bresson exploited its possibilities to such an extent that nothing new has really been added in terms of design since then. But what he sees even more is that photographers are no longer perceived as storytellers, but only as contractors who are supposed to provide the editorial offices with the images that are merely needed to illustrate the stories. It is obvious that truthfulness suffers as a result. Because if you are no longer given any space to photographically depict the context, the pictures only provide tiny snippets of the events that the reader actually wants to get a full picture of. There is a reason for this saying.

In fact, I learned a lot about the EuroMaidan in his piece that I suspected but had never seen documented. Who knows that there is a shopping mall under Independence Square in Kiev (Maidan Nezalezhnosti) where you could buy brand-name clothes unhindered during the protests?

Keyword clothes

Weber also writes a few sentences about the demonstrators’ outfits. I was very pleased about that, because I haven’t really seen it addressed anywhere. But as a photographer, I’m naturally interested in how people look and how they dress. And somehow you always dress to suit your chosen role, including the demonstrator, who may be involved in violence but is much more likely to get along in front of a camera lens. And so he chooses the revolutionary look, mixed from his images of revolutions in his visual memory. From 1917 in Russia to the English workers’ protests and the Arabellion.

And so, as a photographer, he helps to shape the look of future demonstrators, only to photograph them again…

Gilles Peress as a reference

He cites one of my favorite books as an example of good photographic storytelling: Telex Iran (1979) by Gilles Peress. It is, of course, just one of many good photojournalistic works published after HCB’s milestones. But it shows brilliantly how to tell a story objectively from a personal point of view. Also because he didn’t necessarily tailor his story to the needs of the editors, but told his message consistently.

The message to us photographers is rightly to see ourselves less as vicarious agents. There are still plenty of opportunities to publish a good story these days. But it has to be coherent in terms of message and context…