Does photojournalism still mater?

zbphoto

zbphoto

Active member
For you americans, CBC is a major broadcaster in Canada and Q is one of their most popular programs. The this story is from around 3-21 minutes so not long, and it was definitely worth the listen. She interviewed a working photographer as well as a past director of Magnum one of the most influential photojournalist agencies of all time.

Sparknotes: Magnum director argues that it's dead especially in Europe and that why should agencies send photographers to war zones when there are already people there with iphones putting out content. The photographer argues that the Chicago layoffs was just a cover up for a poorly run paper that needed to save money.

I'd just like to hear what you guys think, is photography as journalism a dying art, is everything going to video, or is photography still relevant?

I personally think that I think this applies to skiing, in the last two or three years i've definitely seen a huge shift to video, especially in event coverage. I think that relying on citizens to be at events with iPhones is just stupid, there is a huge difference in quality for professional photographers with real cameras and that the two shouldn't even be compared.
 
Photojournalism will always be relevant

Look at the response over the internet about the Sun-Times layoffs, people with no direct interest in photography and/or journalism can see the giant faults in it. Personally I believe that people will always seek the highest quality of work, its the reason most people prefer actual periodicals like Time or Nat Geo compared to some college dropout's blog, or go and see movies by accredited directors and not the home movies their friends make. While yes a regular citizen can capture a decisive moment on their phone, Try asking an average Joe with a cellphone or a random reporter to actual cover a story, and right away you will see why its a bad idea. Photojournalism is not so much about the actual physical quality of the photo, but the ability to transcend entire news stories into a few powerful, decisive pictures. Just as the one interviewee was talking about with the Boston explosions, there was a perfectly good video of the event, but people really clung onto the photos taken by the professional photogs there that day more than anything else.

Last Point: While video can be extremely stirring, it is of course impossible to be printed (Though we can talk about the end of print journalism some other time) If you want stories covered by video there's an amazing thing called the news that is show on most channels, and I personally believe that covering a story with video is actually harder than photo in some cases, which means having regular journalists and/or citizens attempt it would be disastrous.

"Journalism starts with the picture, and when the picture suffers the product suffers,"-----Think about how many times you've flipped through a magazine and only looked at the pictures...

 
IMO, as long as people have shorter and shorter attention spans, and demand info faster and faster, photojournalism will become more relevant as time goes on. Why? Because people will just want to look at the photos and read the captions rather than the articles.

I think that all these news agencies that make you have to "Go to the galler" and open up a new window or tab to view it, having it have to load and shit is a bad idea, it makes people less likely to go through and spend time with it. A little more interactive photo format integrated into the article is what I believe you will likely see in the future

people appreciate good photos, I don't think iphones will replace photojournalists ever.
 
Iphones will phase themselves out as camera companies bank in on the accessibility that they have created.

In not too long, Canons and Nikons and whatever the fuck else, will likely be able to access the net, and send high-quality photos directly to an editor out of thin air. That will fucking murder this whole iphone dipshittery...

especially being as a photojournalist's lens of choice these days is something like a 70-200, or longer. Something an Iphone can't replicate, no matter how much an appletard wants to think it can with some bullshit digital 'zoom'.

maybe small sensors will get better or something, but it's still not going to do what even a small M4/3 camera can do.

 
I came to write basically this. Photo journalism is still very relevant, whether or not people think it is. If anything, photos will become more important, no one likes to read more than a paragraph and photos can convey the story or at very least make it stronger.
 
Photojournalism is entirely still relevant. With that said, traditional photojournalism will always remain, but I think we'll see a lot more multimedia-type stuff that takes photojournalism to the next level. IE the story the NY times came out with last year about the avalanche at Steven's Pass: http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunnel-creek

very cool stuff!

The problem with video is it's not user-defined--you start watching an edit and you're stuck with what the creator has provided. Whereas with a photo essay the user gets to flip through and choose what he sees in regard to the amount of time he has and what he's most interested by. The cool thing about the multimedia article is it can blend the two, choosing photos and videos pertinent to each section; and I think it's pretty clear that as this advances print will continue to be phased out, which is sad, but multimedia and photojournalism lend themselves better to digital anyway.

The bottomline is always that higher quality work draws a greater emotional response from the viewer. That's why it's easy to flip through a facebook photo album without getting anything out of it; whereas a well done photo essay may always keep you coming back, which is what the journalist wants.
 
Yep. The commercial prevalence of iPhone photography seems to be a technological game of leapfrog. The model of a digital camera being a self-contained unit that requires a computer to broadcast has been phased out to an ever-increasing degree by the instant sharing capabilities of cell phones. But since this is leap frog we're talking about here, you can definitely expect large camera companies to incorporate wifi or 3G into their cameras. In fact, they've already started...
 
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