There’s a long and passionate discussion at SportShooter.com, kicked off by Heather Hughes’ lamenting the arrival of video in the photojournalism department, and running through the full range of ideas about the place of the medium in newspapers.
Hughes, who hinted that she’s considering getting out of the business unless she can find a newspaper that gives heart-and-soul to the still image, ended her initial post with this:
Curious to hear if anyone else sees this so-called “trend” the way I do: as the self-destruction of photojournalism.
I’m not going to attempt to encapsulate the discussion that kicked off. If you have the time — and it will take time: the thread has reached the maximum number of posts allowed — it’s an interesting look into the discussion that’s going on in newsrooms.
Overall, it’s a little early for all this angst, although it’s always the transitional times that produce the most hand-wringing and stance-taking, I guess. Video is only one of many new forms of storytelling that have emerged over the past decade, and newspapers (and other media) still have no clear idea about how they all fit together.
I also think there is a small blind spot in the vision of those who insist on the single image’s purity/power. They can cite a rich history of iconic images that are widely remembered as symbols of particular moments. But most of those images came at a time of scarcity. There was only one Joe Rosenthal there when the U.S. Marines raised the flag at Iwo Jima. Only a handful of photographers were immersed in the frontline coverage of Vietnam. With the explosion of media, there has been an explosion of images, so many that there are few events any more that produce a single, iconic image, and we are as likely to remember the video (the second plane hitting the World Trade Center, for example) as we are one still image that captures the event.
I love photojournalism and good photography and the ability of a talented shooter to stop me cold, make me laugh, choke me up, make me think. But good video storytelling can do the same thing (but in a different way). The eye and the heart of the folk behind the viewfinder, whether they’re shooting f8 @ 1/125 or 30fps, is what tells the tale.
Sure, the mad rush to video is resulting in a lot of mediocre video at websites. It’s not just the technical aspects that are underdeveloped, it’s that some newspapers are pouring resources into stories better told with words, or sound or, yes, single still images. But there’s mediocre photojournalism being done, too: it’s not as though we are moving from the “perfect art” in all circumstances to something weaker, or lesser.
Does video represent the self-destruction of photojournalism? Not even close.
SOURCE: A PHOTO A DAY | TAGS: PHOTOJOURNALISM, NEWSPAPERS, VIDEO
Right on, Mark.
The perspective that you bring to the iconic stills argument is like found money.
Have we forgotten that some of the best documentary videos ever made showcase the power of still frames? To hold a moment is a wonderful thing – reproducing it as a lithograph is only one expression for the form.
In a skilled editor’s hands, video can use still frames in many ways that not only taps the emotion of a frozen moment, but allows a layering of richer storytelling dimensions and voices.
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Great point. I think the fundamentals of what we are doing as journalists requires at least as much debate as stills vs. video, or whether to add comments to a newspaper website.
People tend to be locked in their world, and loose perspective. And to think in terms of “iconic images” is forgetting that there are many ways to show events with photography, not just “the one that will be remembered as the most iconic”.
Video has been along for many years (in tv,not on the web), and just gives a reporter a different way to tell a story. But there is something that worries me much more, and that trend is international. It is the trend towards “infotainemet” and to avoid covering political issues in depth.