Photojournalism has always been about the relationship between light and life. Photojournalism 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, must goad the viewer to consider see deeply and consciously into the lives of the poor and the powerful, the living and the dying.
Today, we are socially conditioned to the 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 as well as a reality.
Photojournalism extends our visual encounters with the world beyond the blare of a quickly forgotten headline or the triviality of a sound bite. 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.
As Bresson suggests, “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 develop the skills needed to capture the decisive moment through practice, 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 receive as news is predicated on the capture of a decisive moment – the peak, climatic, and otherwise dramatic composition representative of the event.
Since the beginning of modern photojournalism, about the time of the death of the original LIFE magazine in the early 1970s, the decisive moment has driven photojournalism education to a large extent. Students have been pushed to think that that if they missed the "moment" they missed the story.
Albeit a very salient concept, training photojournalists to think in terms of the decisive moment has meant less time could be spent on understanding communicative processes, ethics and emerging technologies.
With a rare exception, much of photojournalism education has concerned itself with the application of desired skill sets, such as the decisive moment. Little attention, regrettably, has been directed toward the training photographers to think and act like reporters. In addition, little attention has been given to training photographers to understand the power and moral agency of their relationship with society.
Fortunately, photojournalism education has been changing in recent years. Many educators now have advanced graduate degrees and work toward integrating theory into their applied courses. More schools also require students to undertake writing and editing courses.
From this perspective, photojournalists will continue to be more ethically and critically trained -- they will be better able to attend to the business of visual storytelling in more meaningful ways.