Last week at a Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma event, a coalition of publishers and journalism organizations released a set of Global Safety Principles and Practices intended to guide news organizations in how to work with freelancers and local journalists on dangerous assignments. It’s an ambitious but needed step, as so many deaths reminded us last year.
Photojournalism can be like “trying to play Rachmaninoff while wearing boxing gloves,” as former photojournalist Simon Norfolk put it. One looks for the dramatic, the iconic, the universal, and in doing so the photographer then often simplifies the situation, removing it from a specific context that may help explain what the viewer will be seeing.
One of the first photographers to work for the modern-day AFP, founded in 1944 as France was freed from Nazi occupation, Eric Schwab was among the very first witnesses to the boundless horror that Allied forces uncovered as they advanced into Germany, liberating the death camps one after the other.
Middle-aged, financial journalist Felix Salmon stirred the pot on Monday with the following tweet: Advice for budding journalists, from @felixsalmon. (tl;dr: don’t do it!) http://t.co/lJmQ02MdNT — Felix Salmon (@felixsalmon) February 9, 2015 His longer po
32-year old Slate staff writer, Will Oremus, points out that the traditional paths to journalism success are indeed harder for the “traditional” candidate – that upper middle class, liberal arts educated, white male. The counterpoint is that many more non-traditional (but representative) journalists have a means to success (e.g. women, people of color, etc), and the criteria for success isn’t confined to tenure
The question an NPPA-funded study looked at is, “What makes a photograph worth publishing in an age when images are shared in an instant, around the world?” The study has gone beyond the anecdotal to provide some scientific facts.
Most people didn’t need to pause for a second before they started to talk about the photographs that had stayed with them. Images they cited most often involved emotion, story, moment and unique perspective that had drawn them in.
Most people didn’t need to pause for a second before they started to talk about the photographs that had stayed with them. Images they cited most often involved emotion, story, moment and unique perspective that had drawn them in
How the inspiring photojournalist responded when one of her photos was pulled from the cover of the New York Times Magazine for questions of authenticity.
“I would never think of myself as a role model,” says Lynsey Addario. The 41-year-old, twice-kidnapped, mother-of-one, award-winning photojournalist has released, this month, her first book: an autobiography of her life as a Connecticut-born photographer who has spent the last 15 years witnessing the true human cost of war, particularly for women across the world.
So look. Then turn away. If you don’t need to look, I’m with you. If you need to look, you don’t have to apologize. Whatever you do, realize that the stakes are higher than had been imagined. For the same reason, know that it becomes all the more important to understand why ISIS exists at all, and how to break the cycle of violence and the downward spiral that serves them all too well. For that, we need many other images, and much more as well. Not least, we need to appreciate how civilization is a way of seeing
Quality. We know it when we see it, right? That’s what we set out to discover with our eyetracking research described last week in Part One. But just because we recognize quality doesn’t necessarily mean we can articulate it to others.
But just because we recognize quality doesn’t necessarily mean we can articulate it to others.
So let’s see if we can build an actual vocabulary to describe the power of good photojournalism. It’s important —especially now, when the digital world is flooded with mediocre images.
This week my colleague Celia Lebur travelled to Chad’s border with Nigeria to hear the tales of men and women who escaped what may be the worst atrocity in Boko Haram’s six-year Islamist insurgency, the assault on Baga
Jeca Taudte, one of the Instagrammers featured, said the Times didn’t contact her prior to publishing her photo. “Another gracious Instagrammer [commented] on my photo, which alerted me to the fact that me submission had been selected for the online slideshow,” she said. It wasn’t until a Facebook friend posted a photo of the paper that Taude realized that her shot made it on the Times’ front page.
One photographer has taken the mantra that “Home is where your story begins,” and expanded it to include not only his own neighborhood…but all fifty states! Enter Rob Hammer and his new book, “Barbershops of America.”
You have two options when you approach a hostile checkpoint in a war zone, and each is a gamble. The first is to stop and identify yourself as a journalist and hope that you are respected as a neutral observer. The second is to blow past the checkpoint and hope the soldiers guarding it don’t open fire on you.
What makes a photograph worth publishing in an age when images are shared in an instant, around the world? Quality matters, they said. And quality in photojournalism is all about strength of story, a genuine moment, rare access and a perspective on what’s
Can people differentiate between professional and amateur photographs? Yes, quite definitely. Study participants were able to tell whether a photograph was made by a professional or an amateur 90 percent of the time.
