A Photo Student › Shooting Gallery – The limitations of photojournalism and the ethics of artistic representation

The winning press photos by Hetherington and Guttenfelder on the one hand and McQueen’s art work on the other can be seen as two poles defining the spectrum of possible representations of war with a camera – one employs the rhetoric of reportage, the other uses a conceptual strategy, or the rhetoric of the metaphorical. Arguably, the photojournalist has a professional and ethical imperative to capture the immediate circumstances, while the artist has the license or luxury to turn his camera away from these events, even to question the photograph’s ability to accurately represent them. Does one approach function more effectively than another? And by what criteria can we judge their effectiveness? When it comes to images of the events and consequences of war, how close is too close? And how much distance is too much?