What a Photograph Can Accomplish: Bending the Frame by Fred Ritchin. What do we want from our media revolution?
Not just where is it bringing us—but where do we want to go? When the pixels settle, where do we think we should be in relationship to media—as producers, subjects, viewers? Since all media inevitably change us, how do we want to be changed? There used to be a time when one could show people a photograph and the image would have the weight of evidence—the “camera never lies.” Certainly photography always lied, but as a quotation from appearances it was something viewers counted on to reveal certain truths. But this is no longer the case. The billion or so people with camera-equipped cellphones, meanwhile, make photography, like all social media, an easily distributed exchange of information and opinions with few effective filters to help determine which are the most relevant and accurate. This moment of enormous transition forces a rethinking of what photography can do, and what we want it to accomplish.
Meta-narrative: Fred Ritchin on the future of photojournalism. Is smartphone journalism the way forward? Filtering apps such as Instagram and Hipstamatic have penetrated the world of photojournalism.
The Guardian picture desk receives a lot of filtered photographs from news agencies on the wires. We recently included the Hipstamatic shot below, of a man appearing to levitate, in our Picture desk live blog. It's the sort of image that usually illustrates lighter stories. To mix up their coverage Getty had its photographers shoot the US elections on their iPhones as well as conventional DSLRs.
Tougher subjects have been covered, too. What we see with Hipstamatic and Instagram are images that are obviously filtered, but in the history of photography there has never been such a thing as a pure image. Photographers using these apps relish the creative freedom it gives. So, even if we are simply seeing a fever for all things retro spilling over into photojournalism, with picture agencies using it as a way to make more money, we're also seeing an industry-wide change in attitude.
Can Photojournalism Survive in the Instagram Era? An Afghan soldier protects his face from a dust storm.Balazs Gardi / Basetrack.org, Creative Commons.
In late May, the Chicago Sun-Times took the unprecedented move of gutting its photography department by laying off 28 full-time employees, including John H. White, a 35-year veteran who had won the paper a Pulitzer. The nation's 8th largest newspaper figured it could cut costs by hiring freelancers and training reporters to shoot iPhone photos, to which Chicago Tribune photographer Alex Garcia responded: "I have never been in a newsroom where you could do someone else's job and also do yours well.
Even when I shoot video and stills on an assignment, with the same camera, both tend to suffer. They require different ways of thinking. " Experimenting with iPhone photography is nothing new for journalism outlets. Bending the Frame is a vigorous wake-up call to photojournalists to innovate or die.