But then you need to ask whether news or the press should be the main focal point for photography. I certainly don’t buy newspapers for looking at photography (though I used to). I do buy books and magazines though and that’s where people like Amc kick in; they are part of a shift away from a didactic, informational photography towards a broader photography that examines how images are made and consumed in broader culture; it’s part of a move to question how we see images and the effect they have on us. And that question is becoming broader than ever before.
We all like to think that the photographer’s intention inform the image and that when we look at a photograph we can see those intention. But if we ignore the simple fact that we have no way of knowing what the photographer’s intentions were (How would we know? All we have is a photograph), especially in a news context, we don’t just look at photographs, we look at them with our own sets of expectations (as Colin notes) and biases.
The idea is that one should look a certain way in the face of tragedy, part of the simplistic narrative that is expected of people when they are part of a photograph – a simplistic narrative that does not have an equivalence in writing. Here it is easy to explain the contrast between the glorious sky and the casual dress, the trappings of the picnic and the relaxed poses. These are all allowed to happen, but when it comes to a photograph, God forbid if anybody is caught doing anything that lies outside a very narrow band of expected responses
