In many situations, the impact of technological innovation in photography has had a hybridizing effect on photojournalism. In photojournalism, the push from the single frame as the sole conveyance of meaning, toward the use of multi-media, mini-digital, and audio presentation evidences this change.
The idea of a hybrid form of photojournalism suggests that a photographer must now preoccupy themselves with concerns beyond the making of singular iconic images. In a hybridized and hyper-saturated visual culture, the photographer must now be concerned with the mixing of other elements, such as video, interactivity, and sound.
The power of a single frame cannot be underestimated. In the foreseeable future, given our proclivity toward sight over sound and even the sequencing of images, the immediacy of a single frame will continue to subordinate other contributing elements. Yet the push for multimedia threatens to change all of this. Depending on your perspective, this could be a good or bad thing for photojournalism.
The fact that still photography had evolved well after the emergence of film and moving pictures supports this point. Now we are moving in a direction that aligns photojournalism more closely to film in many ways.
During the course of its evolution, the specific nature of photojournalism has derived much of its power from framing, freezing, and fixing specific moments in time. Now, in a hybridized digital environment the opportunities for amplifying these fundamental characteristics exist through the blending of interactive media and high definition.
At the same time, it is unlikely that the iconic image – that single frame that gains meaning beyond its original occurrence through repetition and recall – will fade away with the increased demand in multimedia presentations. Nevertheless, the pressure to produce packaged reportage in a multimedia format may have an impact of the way in which photographers work. In the rush to produce multiple usable images to be sequenced and packaged into a multimedia presentation, the potential for missing the most iconic and salient moment may disappear. When this happens, the danger will be that we may no longer have “decisive moments” to reflect upon, but rather a series of lesser moments strung to together with creative sequencing and sound.