This week, several people sent me an article in the NYTimes written by business correspondent David Jolly about the death of photojournalism. Click the here to read the article and check out a teaser below.
I say in particular that he is a business correspondent because the main players in the article are the agencies, the wire services and the editors. There are only two photographers quoted at the end, Dirck Halstead and Lorenzo Virgili.
Mr. Halstead wrote that, if anything, conditions today were worse than he had predicted. To be a photojournalist today, he wrote, “You have to be crazy.”
I don’t see the collapse of mega-corporations as a marker of the end of photojournalism. Most photographers are small business owners: they make, market and survive off of the sale of their images. When they become successful enough that someone else will do the legwork for them, then the agents and agencies step in.
As I’ve said before on this blog, I fully believe this market upset is creative destruction. If photojournalism was truly born through
the American Civil War photographer Mathew Brady, [who] experienced a golden age lasting from before World War II through the 1970s. [When] Magazines like Time, Life and Paris Match — and virtually all of the world’s major newspapers — had the budgets to put legions of shooters on the ground in competition for the best pictures.
Then why has photojournalism outlasted Life? The changing of one of the medium’s outlets does not signify the end of the photojournalist, just the end of the news-print photo editor. Perhaps that’s why there has been so much coverage of the media this year- they’re selling their own story, their own last gasps for relevance, filtering into front pages in shorter and shorter spurts and blog posts.
The print vs. web debacle, with all the budget and staff cuts, is usually attributed to a failed “business model” which the journalists and photojournalists are not responsible for. Sales teams are selling fewer ads (recession? anyone see that coming?) and there is less budget for stories, reporters and gas. Coupled with this, there is more competition from citizen journalists and dot coms. Rather than editors utilizing their employees’ strengths for producing a quality product, they are abusing free labor interns and forcing veterans to learn how to hop, skip and multimedia with no time, training, or investment. It’s no longer a competition in quality reporting, but speed reporting. The internet is fast, it’s free, and it’s full of people who just want their voices heard. Journalists and photojournalists don’t need to compete with pageviews. It’s like when a cheetah challenges you to a race- you don’t get down on all fours.
Long-form, investigative pieces, in words or images, will always have a place in information markets. The plethora of photos, texts and videos on the internet means there will be an increase in literacy for these mediums, and hopefully for the news media itself. As Moholy-Nagy predicted in 1944,
In the future, the technique of photography will be so simplified and so widely taught and understood that the illiterate per say will be the one who is not a photographer.
As more people consume and create photographs, there will be more of a demand for compelling imagery. There will also be more imagery out there. Therefore, the editor need not worry too much about his paycheck, as new niches will be filled and created by professionals, not occasional journalists.
Perhaps I take such a strong stance on this issue because I am going to the ill-fated Visa pour l’Image this month and I don’t want to hear complaining. I have worked hard for years to arrive where I am, with my first story being sold on Getty Images, and I am not going to believe it’s all over before I’ve even started. The old ways of becoming a photojournalist are dying, but for those of us who have never been good at following paths laid out, a crooked route is not all that unappealing.
So we can lament and pour libations for the heights of what photojournalism once was, but we’ll suffer only vertigo-
And you already know what vertigo is: intoxication with one’s own weakness, the insuperable desire to fall.
(Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel)
Categories: contemplations
Tags: agencies, agents, chechen, cheetah, creative destruction, david jolly, dirck halstead, economics, festival, france, gamma, getty, grozny, images, investigation, journalism, lametation, laurent van der stockt, life, lorenzo virgili, magazines, market, mathew brady, media, moholy-nagy, new york times, newspapers, paris, paris match, photojournalism, picutre, reporting, time, visa pour l'image, world war II
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