‘Ethics and photojournalism’

This is an extract taken from a very interesting post by the wonderful photographer  Stuart Freedman. You can read the full post on the excellent EPUK website.

The presiding styles of photo reporting

A cursory look through today’s newspapers, magazines and web sites reveals that two styles have come to dominate the modern photo documentary.

The first, a cold, bastard child of formalism, seeks to show people dehumanised – as stationary butterflies under glass. Static, bored, disengaged.

The other, which has come to dominate contemporary reportage, shows photographers recording in a sub-Gilles Peres pastiche of abstracted shadows and blurs.

This technique bears little relationship to what is being photographed. It is“stylistically derivative.” There is no attempt to explain and let ‘truth be any kind of prejudice’ (to paraphrase).

It is about the photographer who “never dignifies anyone as a fellow human being.” It also fundamentally fails to understand the context within which Peres worked in Iran.

It seems to me that in the rush to create a new visual storytelling in the post-newspaper age, many photographers are overtly marketing themselves as brands: self-appointed heroes who believe they are interpreting the world in a singular way who in reality are shooting visual clichés of suffering because it sells and advances their careers.