Earlier this year the New York Times’ Lens Blog shared some thoughts from Donald Winslow, a long-time photojournalist and former editor of the National Press Photographers Association’s “News Photographer” magazine, about the “uncertain future of photojournalism.” A few days later, they published a rebuttal of sorts by Leslye Davis, a NYT staffer, who begged to differ.
The pieces felt like polar opposites. “Everything is terrible” or “everything is awesome.” The truth, however, was likely somewhere in between. A friend and I chatted about these posts, and about our industry, and because we’d both been trained at the Missouri School of Journalism to back our journalism with research, we wanted some data. So, one Sunday afternoon during March Madness, we cobbled together some basic survey questions (nothing scientific) to try to get some actual numbers. We thought maybe a few dozen folks would respond, but at least we’d have a starting point.

Mills’ photos give us the opportunity to think about how journalists can use photographs and videos taken from above — whether by helicopter, plane or drone — in really creative ways to break news and tell stories. How does shooting from above help the audience? How does it help tell a more nuanced story? And what kinds of stories can local newsrooms tell with these shots beyond tracking traffic, animals escaping, or the latest local fire?

“In these turbulent times, photojournalists are obviously needed, and play an essential role,” says Jean-François Leroy as Visa announces its programme

Since its formation, in 1947, the Magnum photo agency, or, more accurately, the work of its photographers, has contributed to the formation of a shared visual consciousness. Many of the definitive images of the past half century were taken by Magnum photographers, even if we never knew their names: W. Eugene Smith’s photos of an exhausted country doctor, taken in 1948; Raymond Depardon’s picture of Lee Evans raising a black power salute, at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics; the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, chronicled by Mark Power; Paolo Pellegrin’s harrowing portraits of refugees making a desperate crossing from Libya to Europe, in 2015. Magnum photographers, it seems, have always been there to document a moment of crisis, a moment for change.