Silver Line Productions

Photojournalism Research

By Ainsley Brooks

Photojournalism is the art or practice of communicating news by photographs, they are used to tell a news story to the world.

History: The beginning (1839-1880)

The first known photograph was of a human being, the photo is a blurred figure of a frenchman having his boots polished on a Paris boulevard. Richard Lacayo said photos like these grainy, static, images are the "forerunners of photojournalism and the promise of wonders to come".

Other periods included:

• Global News (1880-1920) • Conscience (1880-1920) • Magazine Days (1920-1950) • New Directions (1950-1980) • Resurgence (1980-1995)

Photojournalists

Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange (Born May 26, 1895 was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era.

Lange's photographs humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development of documentary photography. It is said that Lange 'set up' this picture to show vulnerable women with the lack of male presence.

In this picture you can see that the image is symbolic of the struggle to live and better youself, it represents visual proganda ironically. The photo focuses on a mother with her two children in old clothing struggling showing she is poor.
This generates sympathy from the audience because they can see that she is alone and the children don't have full support finically.

Jeff Wall

Born 29th September 2011 in British Columbia. Wall was known for setting up modern staged documentary photography. It is not moving, it is still so this allows the audience to make up their own interoperation.
Wall experimented with conceptual art and wanted his photos to be different. Many of his pictures were staged and they referred to the history of art and philosophical problems of representation.
"The spontaneous is the most beautiful thing that can appear in a picture, but nothing in art appears less spontaneously than that."

Jeff Wall/Toscani/Paul Smith mostly took Post War “Modern staged manipulator” Images constructed using actors, sets, etc. Defining his realities, with no sense of capturing the events as they happen, more inventing the moments for defined reason.

Lewis Hine

Born 26th September 2011 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin is an American photographer. He once said "Ethical ideals of people not products showing capitalism under belly". Most of Hine's work shows the expository mode. In the "Photojournalism: The Professional's Approach" it states that Hine was a social-documentary photographer and that he demonstrates the camera could not only provide a reocrd of events but could also serve as a potent tool for social change.
He once said that in his work he wants to show "things that had to be corrected and things that should be appreciated." (Kobre: page 422)

Robert Frank

Born 9th November 1924 in Zurich, Switzerland. Robert was known for making social statements through photography.
Frank used photography in a way to show modern America. In most of his pictures he would show the working class, black vs white and the social issues they have to battle everyday.
Frank once said that "black and white are the colours of photography. To me they symbolise the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected." (brainyquote.com)

Henri-Cartier Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) is one of the most original, accomplished, influential, and beloved figures in the history of photography. His inventive work of the early 1930s helped define the creative potential of modern photography, and his uncanny ability to capture life on the run made his work synonymous with “the decisive moment". Cartier-Bresson was a Magnum founder and a full Member since 1947. He mainly took images showing the 'decisive moment'.

"To take a photograph is to align the head, the eye and the heart. It's a way of life." - quote from magnumphotos.com

Nick Ut

Ut took a photo of children fleeing from an American napalm strike in 1972, this image earned Ut the Pulitzer prize and gained alot of attention for many years.

This photo represents the "decisive moment" this photo is shocking because it shows the fear of these children and the girl in the middle had ripped off her napalm-burned clothing.

"The Decisive Moment, the emotional difference between the event (driven) being in control VS the photographer (driven) being in control"

Pre/post- War “The decisive moment” the images are taken without thought of reason for meaning, just a momentary snapshot of reality, taken in an instance with no agenda, reporting on the event “naturally”.

Martin Parr/ Philip Lorca diCorsia. Photo-Artist-anthological-observer, Post-war Social-voyeur-artist Redefining “everyday” events using defined contexts, generating discourses about those moments. Neither being part of the instant moment or the staged-choreographed event.

"Technology defines documentary"

Photojournalism modes:

The observational mode - natural (not looking into the camera) This mode emphases the documentary filmmaker's engagement in observing the subject's daily life and circumstances, documenting them with an unobtrusive camera.

Example: By maintaining the observational mode, the director allowed the subject to forget the presence of the camera and behave more naturally, thereby letting the audience get a better sense of how she really feels about having such an unusual abundance of facial hair.

The reflexical mode - Using everyday situation to construct symbolic social comments, interacting with the subject. This mode demonstrates consciousness of the process of reading documentary, and engages actively with the issues of realism and representation, acknowledging the presence of the viewer and the modality judgements they arrive at. Corresponds to critical theory of the 1980s

The participatory mode - the filmmaker is taking part in the events. It is the encounter between film-maker and subject is recorded, as the film-maker actively engages with the situation they are documenting, asking questions of their subjects, sharing experiences with them. Heavily reliant on the honesty of witnesses

The poetic mode - The study of people, this 'reassembling fragments of the world', a transformation of historical material into a more abstract, lyrical form, usually associated with 1920s and modernist ideas

Book: Photojournalism: the world's top photographers and the stories behind their greatest images. By Steel, Andy, Hove : RotoVision 2006

Ron Haviv

Ron Haviv is a photojournalist, producing work covering a broad spectrum of international conflict. He is the author of several photographic collections and the recipient of a number of awards. (Wiki)

Panama, 1989
A soldier looks on passively as newly elected Vice President Guillermo Ford is beaten by a paramilitary supporter of dictator General Manuel Noriega. (Taken from the Photojournalism book, listed above)

Tim A. Hetherington

Tim A. Hetherington is a photojournalist, he has the demeanor of a modest member of London's professional elite, not someone who spends two-thirds of the year in some of west Africa's most dangerous countries.

Monrovia, Liberia, June 2003
The fighting to reach Monrovia had been pretty intense. Hetherington says he was "with a second group of fighters, perhaps around 500 or so, who were trying to punch through government lines to reach another group trapped in the city.
When two groups did finally link up, they established a base at an old warehouse, where I took this picture". It's one of my favourites because it's something so tender and human from a situation that we always seek to dehumanise. It's also a picture you don't often see in conflict photography where the focus tends to be on weapons, suffering, and death.

Chris Hondros

Hondros is an American photographer. He explains in the “The World’s Top Photographers” book that “Photojournalism is both a way to make a living and an important political tool.” He uses the medium to highlight things that are happening in parts of the world that aren’t necessarily understood by the masses. His images are not so much out and out photography, but more news reportage that involves travel. (Page 70)

Tal Afar, Iraq, 2005
In this picture a young girl is shown screaming covered in blood after her parents were killed by US soldiers serving with the 25^th Infantry Division in a shooting. This image is both touching and a little stressing because you feel for the girl because she has to experience something like this at her age.
Hondros said that his “primary work is with areas of conflict and war and it’s fair to say that my photography is based on conflict”, which is shown through this photograph.

Images above taken from "The World's Top Photographers: Photojournalism" book by Andy Steel

Photo Story

"Telling stories with pictures"

For many photojournalists, telling whole stories with pictures is the ultimate professional experience, regardless of whether they run in print, on the internet, or even on television.

Sometimes stories can be built in a matter of minutes; some-times storytelling can take years. Whereas Jim MacMillan of the Philadelphia Daily News photographed his story about a hostage situation in fewer than five minutes (see below), Alan Berner shot his essay about the New West during a six month sabbatical from the seattle time. Brian Plonka, of the spokane Review, spent two years documenting how alcoholism is passed from one generation to another.

Jim Macmillan photo essay

After a high-speed chase into the centre of Philadephia, a triple-murder bailed out of his car and led police on a brief foot-chase.

Jim Macmillan shot this part of the sequence with a 500mm lens plus a 1.4X tele-extender, giving him an effective 700mm telephoto. The long lens allowed him to stay back and avoid the possibility of taking a bullet himself.

Alan Berner photo essay

Alan Berner, who works for Seattle Times, received a Nikon/NPPA sabbatical grant to photograph "The West." His goal, he told seattle Times, was to photograph the west in the 1990s as Arthur Rothstein had done in the 1930s.

Rothstein had photographed the region for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the great Depression. His assignment had been to document disaster. Berner's six-month photographic journey took place during the 1990s, a period of board prosperity.

Analysing the image

Documentary films are films too. They are among the principal achievements in cinematic history, and involve a complex array of different potential styles and approaches. They do not simply record "the truth" in a purely neutral, objectively disinterested manner; they argue for positions and critique others, often in the interest of providing inspiration for social change. Throughout the recorded history of world cinema, three principal aims drive forward production and reception: 1. entertainment, 2. artistic expression, and 3. social critique as contribution to, or instrument of, social change

1. What is the principal subject of this documentary? What is its principal purpose? Does it argue for a position? Does it critique a position? What kind of impact does it seek to achieve with - and upon - its intended audience?

2. Does this documentary film make use of material? (e.g., live action, scene location, and/or interview) recorded as spontaneously as possible subject only to the effect introduced by the immediacy of observation from the camera operator/director?

3. Does this documentary film make specific choices about what material is to be recorded in relation to the direct observation by the camera operator/director? If so, what kinds of choices, of what should be included and what not, and what kinds of images should be emphasized and what de-emphasized? What, in short, does the documentary film maker look at, and encourage us to look at - and to see - as most important about the principal, subject of his or her film?

4. Does this documentary film combine recorded material with voice-over commentary in which the material directly illustrates what the commentary indicates? If so, how so and to what effect does the film make use of this kind of combination?

More at: http://personal.centenary.edu/~jhendric/film_seminar/analyzing_documentary_films.html