Week 12 - Photojournalism

Contemporary journalism is filled with images (Zelizer, 2005). Photojournalism can be said to be a hybrid of photography and journalism. It is a from of journalism in the way that how the picture is accumulated, reworked and presented to tell a news story. With the famous quote "pictures are worth 1,000 words", Bulkholder (2002) points out that it is equivalent to 25 inches of print in the newspaper business. Images are on of the most influential forms of communication, mostly in journalism. One image, she argues, can summarize an event or person or motivate a nation. an image can distress people more than endless pages of print.

 Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk from Vietnam burned himself to death to bring attention to the repressive policies of the Catholic Diem. 

 The "Pulitzer Prizer" winning photo taken in 1994 during the Sudan Famine.

 

Separation of different racial groups in daily life activities in the United States.

We can see how photojournalism has brought excitement and entertainment into news by these powerful pictures. But, as I mentioned in my Photography and Culture post, we as the audience must always be of images being presented to us. How true is the 'truthful news'?

This brings about ethical issues of photojournalism. A good photojournalist can create photos that can rock people out of nonchalance by representing reality. However to achieve this, certain expectations (of the picture) must be made as mentioned by Zelizer "many of the popular and professional evaluations of journalistic photographs are driven by the impact that they are thought to wield on the public." Photographs have always had the ability to manipulate the truth using certain methods of photo production. Captions in photographs for news reports can also distort the truth of an image; anchorage can shape dominant meanings.

 Published photo

 

Original photo

An Associate Press photo that featured on the USA Today website showed then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice with weird menacing eyes, a result of too much doctoring. 

Creating false images and portraying them as factual photographs, with words, is seen as unethical in photojournalism. Why?

Because it regulates the truth rather than showing as it is. Thus the news will become subjective. The media does control the "truth" in a sense of them choosing how and what to present to the public. In a reaction to the many doctored pictures by news photographers, Kent Cooper (1947), an executive for the Associated Press wrote:

"This is a personal appeal for a new approach to pictures of people taken individually or in groups. I earnestly ask that you put a premium on the natural, unposed pictures of people. Obviously you cannot pose spontaneous shots without being deceitful. It is just as deceitful for a photographer to make a man or woman to look some way or act some way that is unnatural." (p. 48)

Hence as long as photojournalists are aware of the ethnics of the Fourth Estate, then the news can be a balance of being both entertaining and truthful.

References:

Johnson, B. M., Mayer, R. E., and Schmidt, F. (2004). Careers in photojournalism. Oppurtunities in photography careers (pp. 93-99).

Zelizer, B. (2005). Journalism through the camera’s eyes. In Allan, S. (ed.), Journalism: Critical issues (pp. 167-176). Berkshire: Open University Press.

Warburton, N. (1998). Electrical photojournalism in the age of the electronic darkroom. In Kieran, M. (ed.), Media ethics (pp.123-134). London: Routledge.