I just finished a short essay for an exhibition featuring the work of photojournalist David Burnett at the Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, Oregon.
I feel pretty good about this piece and thought I would share it here.
For Love of Light and Life
Photojournalism has always been about the relationship between light and life. It is a complex and fully human way of capturing, describing and explaining to others what words often fail to do. From this perspective, photojournalism signifies a social and empathic visual encounter with "reality," one that is capable of accentuating the textured fabric of the human condition with dignity, grace, and compassion.
The skilled photojournalist responds to the world emotionally and intellectually by documenting people, places, and things with honesty and humility. The power of photojournalism resides in its insistence on being a holistic and humanistic enterprise. The photojournalist, in turn, must be faithful to a moment of truth, as he or she encounters the world. Photojournalism, at its best, goads us into considering more consciously events that affect our lives.
Today, we are socially conditioned to a deluge of photojournalistic impressions that meet the eye daily, from the run-of-the-mill to the iconic. Within our visually pervasive culture, photojournalism remains committed to documenting the immediacy and intimacy of life as it unfolds around the corner and across continents. Photojournalism is about telling stories with a camera – it is a way of allowing the viewer to see beyond the picture-making process by entering into and connecting with humanity and the world as it is fixed within our collective memory of place and time. The photographer’s eye informs, constructs, and shapes social reality. As eyewitness to the tumult and triumph of human endeavor, major and minor, the photographer’s truth – the image – fixes and mediates a moment of time, not only as a representative anecdote, but also as a reality.
The photojournalist’s eye is informed by the principle of the decisive moment, an expression coined by photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson to sum up his feelings about the convergence of critical visual elements in time and space. For Bresson, “Sometimes there is one unique picture whose composition possesses such vigor and richness, and whose content so radiates outward from it, that this single picture, is a whole story in itself. But this rarely happens.” Most photojournalists require many years of practice to capture the decisive moment, for the formula for constructing such pictures is chiefly governed by an individual’s ability to anticipate and react to what is placed before lens. For this reason, much of what viewers perceive as news is predicated on the photographer’s capacity to capture the decisive moment – the peak, climactic, and otherwise dramatic composition representative of the event.
However, reducing an event to a single fixed moment in time can be problematic. From this perspective, images produced through the decisive moment style may fail to explain a complex array of factors leading up to and after the picture has been captured.
More for than four decades, photojournalist David Burnett has traveled the world in search of moments of truth. In his exhibition, “Measures of Time”, Burnett’s pictures epitomize the precision and process that helped to define the culture of photojournalism, both as an occupational group as well as a form of creative expression.
Burnett’s work reflects some of the more salient and emblematic moments of the latter-half of the twentieth century. In this exhibit, Burnett’s style captures the “vigor and richness” of light and life that Cartier-Bresson so often highly prized. Burnett is a master of the decisive moment, but he is also a conscientious observer – someone given to a minimalist approach that emphasizes an appreciation for understanding the underpinning social and political context of an event.
Burnett’s images have a strong and definitive center of focus – framed by the carefully composed geometry of light and shadow. The pictures before us demand our attention because they force us to recall events and people from our past as well as our present. This is what news images require of viewers – pictures give us pause to think, feel, and hopefully move us toward compassion and caring. Burnett's photographs, however, do not only reflect a high level of photographic technical and compositional skill, they also serve as ideological and sociological benchmarks of our culture. Therefore, the pictures become interesting and valuable not only based on aesthetic appeal, but also for the context in which they were made.
In an article discussing the use of large format (single frame) cameras in sports photography, Burnett keenly observes a process that is evident in all of his work: “Waiting and watching is the key….The sense of discipline, the patience to wait, and capture ‘The Moment’. Sometimes you get it, as in all photography, and most often you don't.”
Fortunately, for us, and for the photographer, there are many more moments grandly captured than casually missed.