More than 1000 words
By Browen Latimer Posted Jul 1 2002
Without saying a word, photos express the range of emotions, including happiness, confusion, sadness and despair, of a child whose village was destroyed by war. – AFP/ JEWEL SAMAD
Photo Gallery
We live in a visual society. We can see war in the Middle East or a soccer game in Argentina in real time. Pictures adorn everything from buttons to billboards. Babies inside wombs, fish at the bottom of the sea and microbes are all available to the naked eye through photography. No place, no matter how
inaccessible, seems accessible.
So are photographers the new reporters of the 21st century? No, but I would argue, now more than ever, photographers are the best kind of reporters. They have to physically be in the middle of the story to make a picture. A reporter can cheat. The Internet, telephones, librarians and live television newscasts are all available to help a writer tell a story from a distance.
The World Trade Center disaster is a good example of the difference photographers can make. The world watched the events unfold thanks to television cameras perched high on buildings several miles away from the catastrophe. Many people said they felt like they were watching a Hollywood film, like it didn’t feel real. The photographers took them there. Patrick Witty’s picture of the faces of all nationalities staring in shock at the sky signaled that, for many, life had changed forever. In Shannon Stapleton’s beautifully edited essay, even the color of the film moves from a vivid, pristine blue to a choking black and finally a crimson haze, just like the day itself. Samantha Appleton’s award-winning photograph shows a masked worker beginning the recovery process and wiping the thick dust from a still-standing window to write the word, “Morgue,” in large red letters. The photographers swallowed the same dust and ran in fear through the streets just like the survivors did. It shows.
Covering the war in Afghanistan is the final leap into the digital age for many photographers. Wire services, agencies and magazines all outfitted their photographers with digital cameras, laptops and satellite phones. Even seasoned war photographers such as Tony Suau, Yunghi Kim and Chris Anderson switched to digital cameras. The terrain is inhospitable and causes difficulties for satellite linkage and transmissions to ftp sites. Some photographers were delayed for weeks by dust, ancient planes, bandits and aggressive military forces, but they still managed to file pictures and e-mail editors.
The real danger now lies in the believability of photographs. Readers, because they own Adobe Photoshop software, often expect pictures to be manipulated. They know what it can do. But a professional journalist knows that two of his best tools are patience and anticipation. If you know the story well, you can guess where you should be. With a little patience, you will then have a picture that no one else, especially those who travel in packs, will have. It is imperative, now more than ever, that photographers do their homework – read clips, get books on background whenever possible and interview people who can help them – when deciding how to tell a story. One recent case in point is the Israeli attack on Yasser Arafat’s compound in Ramallah. Looking back, it was obvious that the Israelis would hit Arafat hard after the Passover massacre in Netanya, but very few photographers were there to capture the initial explosion. Scott Nelson was, and his photograph sold for a very hefty sum.
Speed and efficiency in the digital age has also created a small conundrum for photographers. Editors see their pictures faster, but they can also see other people’s pictures as well. From Afghanistan, I have been able to compare stories on the brick makers, the children’s hospital, the mental hospital, the oppression of women and the opium trade. What does this mean? I can see who spent a lot of time working on a story from the inside out and find the surprising picture one couldn’t predict. Many people photographed the brick makers, but only John Stanmeyer discovered that part of the process included the need for very tiny children to crawl across the cooling bricks and turn them over without squishing them during the drying process. He presented the use of child labor in Afghan society in a surprising, memorable way.
It’s not just documentary photojournalism that requires extra research to make a picture the best it can be. Celebrity portraiture and even still life come alive when the right approach is used. Think of Peggy Sirota’s girlish portrait of Drew Barrymore, the cold confines of frozen food by Irving Penn, the haunting loveliness of Sally Mann’s pictures of adolescence or the boldly lit faces by Richard Burbridge. The artistry of those photographs brings out the essence of the subject. And that is still what photography is all about—taking people to places where they haven’t gone themselves and or inside ideas they haven’t had.
Oscar Wilde once said that the pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple. But photography can help.