Coupled, two Rohingya pictures prove the vitality of photojournalism – Columbia Journalism Review

EVER SINCE THE ARRIVAL of video as a news medium, commentators have pronounced the still news photograph obsolete. Susan Sontag led the way in 1977. She considered photojournalism dead. “The vast photographic catalogue of misery and injustice throughout the world has given everyone a certain familiarity with atrocity, making the horrible seem more ordinary—making it appear familiar, remote (‘it’s only a photograph’), inevitable.” James Lever, in the 2018 spring-summer issue of the engaging Oxford arts magazine Areté, similarly disdains the still photograph and exalts the smart phone. “The photograph seems to bespeak a deep nostalgia for the diminishing 20th century idea of photojournalism itself, that discipline that once considered itself an unacknowledged legislator capable of authoritative intervention in public affairs.”