Dennis Dunleavy is, whether he set out to or not, running a virtual seminar on photojournalism and war at his blog The Big Picture. Over the past week or so, he’s penned the following:
Transcoding Lebanon:Photographic meaning from one form of coded representation to another
Questioning the “commonsense” of news photographs
Picturing the Language of Death
There’s a lot to absorb in all that. Dennis raises a number of huge questions about the role of photojournalism is reflecting and representing “reality” and the role that selection and interpretation plays in the ways in which we are informed and the ways in which we understand. After reading his posts, both over the course of the past several days, and then again this evening, in one gulp as it were, my head hurts, but in that good way that comes from being forced to think.
Journalism, as its practiced, is not a hugely reflective task. Questions about what we do as journalists come in simple frames, such as an ethical code or objectivity or parsing the political. Few dig deeper, into what we are really doing, with images and words. I don’t know about all journalists, but I met very few (and was not one myself) who examine what they are doing in terms of the rhetorical forces at work, or the semotics of image. The emergence of a reflective blogosphere, which gives rise to post like Dennis’s, may change that.
I’m hoping that at some point, Dennis will take the individual posts he’s been doing on images and the war in Lebanon and Israel, and pull them together into a single post. There would be great value to that.
TAGS: PHOTOJOURNALISM, WAR, SEEING
[...] MARK Hamilton chama a atenção para o weblog de Dennis Dunleavy, que tem discutido as imagens da guerra. Vale a pena seguir o link e dar uma volta pelos posts de Dunleavy pelo que eles nos ensinam a propósito de fotografia de guerra. [...]