Dennis Dunleavy

Conditions of Knowing

Historian James Krippner challenges us to think about the relationship between society and photography by posing an important question, especially in an age of instant communication.

Professor Krippner asks, "How do photographic images record, reflect, challenge and occasionally even change social relationships of power?"

Borrowing from Erving Goffman's social interactionist perspective, we live in world of social encounters. By extension, a photograph signifies a sort of mediated expressive form of the social encounters we have with others. In a sense, the photograph becomes a proxy for the experience of a specific encounter. The images also shapes our perception and recollection of the encounter.

Wikipedia defines social interactionism as "a dynamic, changing sequence of social actions between individuals (or groups) who modify their actions and reactions according to the actions by their interaction partner(s)."

Photographs have and will continue to be persausive determinants in a society that is increasingly driven by visual reportage. In today's visual culture, social and visual encounters coexist.  On the most recent cover of the Atlantic Monthly featuring an essay about how presidents lie, there is an image of President Bush leaning off the page, mouth open, and defiant as ever.

What are we to infer about the relationship between the image of the president, the word "lie" typeset in yellow, and the power of the president? A semiotic analysis of these dennotative elements here, the president's face and the yellow text is quite revealing. Our learned symbolic associations with the color yellow signifying cowardness and shame from a Western perspectives feeds the imagination. The statement is subtle, yet terribly powerful.

The combination of the word "lie" and the large black and white image of the president create a symbolic juxtaposition that constructs a social reality in the mind of viewer. The social encounters we have with one another are informed by what we see and think about. The water cooler chat I have with a colleague about the president's actions may be in some subconscious way be informed by the impression I have from what I look at.   

 

Photo Buzz

News Briefs on Photography and Photojournalism

The 16th annual photo LA is coming up January 18-21.

San Bernardino Photojournalist Mary Frampton "A pioneer for women in photojournalism."

Photography from hidden Cuba

Galella: The proud paparazzo

Photojournalism's Lamest Moments 2006

[click on the image to see an enlarged view of the timeline] or Download lamest.pdf  

From the deaths of legends Gordon Parks, Arnold Newman and Joe Rosethal to the scandal surrounding digitally altered and set up pictures in the Lebanonese conflict, it's been an interesting year for photojournalism.

I've been taking a look at some of the more unsettling trends in the industry and have come up with list I call the Lamest Moments.  The categories are limited and very unscientific of course. The big winner, or loser, depending on your perspective, was in my opinion, Reuters not only for the digital manipulation debacle this summer, but also for its latest scheme in trying to attract citizen shutterbugs to contribute pictures to the wire services. Much attention was given to the events of June when a Reuters' photographer sent manipulated pictures of the conflict in Lebanon. Reuters' editors, for their part, dropped the ball by not using common sense and vigilance over what got put up on the wire. The fall out from all this continues to be the increased distrust of mediate visual images.

In the end, photojournalism also took some serious hits in terms of credibility this year from using pictures of the “Green Helmet” guy, which was alledgedly a Hezabollah insider. Bloggers started connecting the dots when pictures of the “Green Helmet” guy was shown at multiple scenes carrying the same body of a dead child and directing photojournalists to make images.

In the "Under reported visual reportage" category, much of the mainstream media missed or played down the release of hundreds of more abuse pictures from Abu Ghraib. Perhaps the images were too graphic for audiences or that since this was just a "follow up" on the pictures originally released in 2003, editors decided that enough was enough.

The New York Post, true to form, gets the "Lamest Headline and Caption" award with its layout showing the bloodied face of Iraqi insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The use of a text call-out to put the words "Warm up the virgins" in Zarqawi does little to ease tensions between the Islamic and Western worlds.

Newsweek magazine walked away the the "Lamest Cover" award by violatiing of every known principle of design, not to mention common sense. Newsweek out did itself with this collage of representative Mark Foley’s fall from grace.

Finally, in the "Lamest Use of Digital Technology" category, a picture claiming to be the world's largest digital image (8.6 gb) tests the boundaries of "so what". Although a  highly debateable, I still think that making an 8.6 gigabyte image using multiple smaller pictures was a bit misleading in claiming to be the world’s largets digital picture. In the end, the PR this picture generated seemed more like a stunt than an actual technological achievement.

The allure of digital photography and its future

The camera's capacity to frame, freeze and fix experience in time has emerged from the basic human desire to shape, authenticate, and rationalize our relationship to the world and our place in it. Today, in a culture bombarded with visually-mediated messages, due in great part to the advance of digital technologies, the allure of creating and possessing increasingly personalized accounts of reality persists. The fundamental characteristics of photography -- the framing, freezing, and fixing  of moments -- has become technologically less challenging and cumbersome in a digital  environment.  The ease and speed in which higher quality images can be made digitally empowers people to move beyond technology to concentrate more on visually storytelling. The challenge now becomes a question of how to interpret all these stories.

Today, anyone with a camera phone or point and shoot digital camera can be a visual storyteller. Advances in digital photography such as liquid lenses, faster buffers, higher resolutions, larger storage capacities, and wireless telephony signify the possibility of democratizing ways of seeing, knowing, and sharing the world with on another. Instead of looking at the advance of digital photography as a threat to privacy, the demise of photojournalism, or even an influence on decreased attention spans, the potential of building communities of observers and the observed emerges. The photograph as an extension of our desire to share, explain, celebrate, expose, explore, and denounce the  human condition is being played out every day on the Internet through sites like Flickr and personal photo blogs.

However, the photograph is also very much a highly redacted and rarefied slice of life -- one in which the photographer's intention sometimes becomes suspect. Even at its very best, the photograph can never replace the array of moral complexities present at the moment of capture. At the same time,  with the increasing advance of digital technologies there appears to be an urgency in questioning the authenticity of the image as well as the credibility of the photographer.

Tom Wheeler in his book, Photo Fact or Photo Fiction, explores this consequence of the digital age.

Wheeler notes:

Larger questions abound. What is the future of photographic credibility and, by extension, the credibility of all visual media, in an age when even amateur shutterbugs have access to increasingly affordable digital cameras...?

Johanna Drucker observes that the possibility of altering images digitally, and by extension reality, does not necessarily radically transform truth. However, what digital technologies have done, according to Drucker, is  actually extend the "possibilities of sustainable disbelief." In other words, what digital photography has introduced into our naive and gullible ways of seeing the world is an increased sense of skepticism and disbelief of the visual. In a hyper-mediated world of instant everything on the Internet, this growing distrust of the visual will have positive  and negative consequences.  For example, since the introduction of the camera phone, we have already seen a knee-jerk crack down on making pictures in public spaces, especially in schools. However, on the positive side, the pervasiveness of the cameras in society represents the possibility for greater transparency in governance, community building and social responsibility.

As Marshall McLuhan contends all forms of media are an extension of self.

“ In this electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness” (McLuhan, 1951).

Photojournalism's Hybridization

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.

American Photo Q & A

Jay DeFoore, editor of the American Photo magazine blog PopPhoto has posted the Q & A from the session he used to write his recent article on influential bloggers.

Here's Jay DeFoore's interview

JD: Do you have a mission statement for the blog?

DD: My mission is directly connected to what I try to do as a teacher -- connect and stayed connected with my students. The web, especially blogging, is an excellent medium for keeping conversations going between us. If I have a mission, it is to extend my teaching beyond the four walls of the classroom, literally blogging can do this. It's just amazing.

I believe, the blog acts like a railroad switching yard for ideas and information. The purpose of my blog is to expand whatever understanding we have of our increasingly visual world by opening up the lines of dialog between professionals, enthusiasts, students, and teachers.  I think it works. I love blogging because it feeds me intellectually and emotionally -- there's this incredible feeling of immediacy that comes from posting and answering emails about the blog that I haven't found elsewhere.

JD: What's been your most successful blog post yet? Is there one you're most proud of?

DD: I am not sure about what a successful blog post might be, but there have been times when I have written something and another blog or e-zine asks me to write something for them or that they want to repost my work.

I have had about four or five posts make there way around the world this way. It's a kick to look at what I have written translated into at least eight languages including, Italian, Spanish, German, Polish, and Japanese. The piece I wrote about the use of the camera phone in the London bombings was this way. It absolutely amazes me who is reading my work. It's not always great writing but at least I am consistent. This essay was used in The Digital Journalist as well as Freelens (a magazine from Germany).

I guess what I am most proud of about blogging is that I have been doing it pretty consistently for more than three years now. I have hundreds of post, some short and some really, really long.

I post at least 4-5 days a week if I can and I am proud of that fact. It takes a lot of energy to write and post, but it is also a thrill because I feel that I am contributing to something much bigger than just what's on my mind.

JD: How much traffic does your site get, either in page views or unique visitors?

DD:  Traffic is generally about 1,000 visitors a week, which isn't a lot in the blogging world. I get about 300 unique visitors a day. The interesting thing is that if I post a lot, more people will pick up on the site and send it around.  However, what I write about is pretty specific so I've never expected anyone to really read my work regularly. What happens is that with the tags people will be out there Googling for something specific and they will stumble across my site.

Another thing is that I try not to be overtly political, although sometimes an opinion creeps in. I try to keep my audience in mind -- mostly students and professionals. The best way I have found to track traffic is to locate who is linking to the blog. This is, in my opinion, a more realistic measure of the blog's purpose and effectiveness. If people are linking to your blog, it means that you gain social capital through the networking factor. I am very happy that people take the time to look at my blog, but it's not the only reason why I do it -- I do it because it is a kick in the pants to be able to write every day about the things I love most about photography.  I wouldn't have this outlet without the blog I don't think -- so there it is.

 

JD: Do you have a mission statement for the blog?

DD: My mission is directly connected to what I try to do as a teacher -- connect and stayed connected with my students. The web, especially blogging, is an excellent medium for keeping conversations going between us. If I have a mission, it is to extend my teaching beyond the four walls of the classroom, literally blogging can do this. It's just amazing.

I believe, the blog acts like a railroad switching yard for ideas and information. The purpose of my blog is to expand whatever understanding we have of our increasingly visual world by opening up the lines of dialog between professionals, enthusiasts, students, and teachers.  I think it works. I love blogging because it feeds me intellectually and emotionally -- there's this incredible feeling of immediacy that comes from posting and answering emails about the blog that I haven't found elsewhere.

JD: What's been your most successful blog post yet? Is there one you're most proud of?

DD: I am not sure about what a successful blog post might be, but there have been times when I have written something and another blog or e-zine asks me to write something for them or that they want to repost my work.

I have had about four or five posts make there way around the world this way. It's a kick to look at what I have written translated into at least eight languages including, Italian, Spanish, German, Polish, and Japanese. The piece I wrote about the use of the camera phone in the London bombings was this way. It absolutely amazes me who is reading my work. It's not always great writing but at least I am consistent. This essay was used in The Digital Journalist as well as Freelens (a magazine from Germany).

I guess what I am most proud of about blogging is that I have been doing it pretty consistently for more than three years now. I have hundreds of post, some short and some really, really long.

I post at least 4-5 days a week if I can and I am proud of that fact. It takes a lot of energy to write and post, but it is also a thrill because I feel that I am contributing to something much bigger than just what's on my mind.

JD: How much traffic does your site get, either in page views or unique visitors?

DD:  Traffic is generally about 1,000 visitors a week, which isn't a lot in the blogging world. I get about 300 unique visitors a day. The interesting thing is that if I post a lot, more people will pick up on the site and send it around.  However, what I write about is pretty specific so I've never expected anyone to really read my work regularly. What happens is that with the tags people will be out there Googling for something specific and they will stumble across my site.

Another thing is that I try not to be overtly political, although sometimes an opinion creeps in. I try to keep my audience in mind -- mostly students and professionals. The best way I have found to track traffic is to locate who is linking to the blog. This is, in my opinion, a more realistic measure of the blog's purpose and effectiveness. If people are linking to your blog, it means that you gain social capital through the networking factor. I am very happy that people take the time to look at my blog, but it's not the only reason why I do it -- I do it because it is a kick in the pants to be able to write every day about the things I love most about photography.  I wouldn't have this outlet without the blog I don't think -- so there it is.

The light becomes us

Here are few of the images of mine from the 1980s and 90s in Central America that will be on display at the Schneider Museum of Art at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, Oregon next month. Here's a link to a webpage with more pictures to view. The pictures above are linked to my Flickr site where you can get more details on when and where they were made.

The featured artist for the exhibition, which runs from Jan. 9 - Feb 24, is David Burnett. David's work is more straight new and features 40 years of excellence in photojournalism. The focus of my work has been the idea of displacement and identity. The intention of the show is to give viewers an understanding of how rich photojournalism is in terms of storytelling.

The demise of photojournalism is not all about the threat from citizen journalism

There has been so much discussion about the demise of photojournalism related to the growth of citizen journalism recently –  a discussion centered around the idea that just about anyone with a camera phone or digital camera can be published. Citizen shutterbugs cannot replace photojournalists entirely, but this newly created stream of images does present a few challenges to the profession. Chief among the problems with a citizen-centered influx of images for news publication is the question of credibility and authenticity. Editors seem to be having their hands full these days just making sure their own professionals are playing by the rules without the burden of checking on the veracity of Uncle Jim Bo’s pictures from the county fair.  Having acknowledged this argument as simplistic and reductive, more attention must be paid to other more systemic issues facing news operations in general, and photojournalism specifically.

If photojournalism is truly dying the slow death so many seem to be predicting then we must look at the economics of an entrenched media industry that is finding it hard to adapt and cope in a faster, leaner digital world.

In an effort to clarify some of the issues facing photojournalism today it may be helpful to construct a list of the top ten influences on the field in the past 20 years. As a disclaimer, as well as an advanced apology to those who know better, making any sort of list is problematic. Here  are some of the major influences affecting photojournalists worthwhile considering.  Some of these influences are more obvious than others.

1.    Media consumption habits and a decreased demand for full-time photojournalists at the daily newspaper.
2.    Media Consolidation
3.    Digital Photography
4.    Electronic photo manipulation
5.    Wireless Internet
6.    Citizen Journalism
7.    Broadband Internet Access
8.    Mini-digital video
9.    Picture Editing

Media Consumption

First to be considered in terms of influences are changes in the ways people consume media. With a decline in daily newspapers fewer photojournalists will be needed. This does not mean that photojournalism is dead, but it does mean few traditional job opportunities for competent individuals. Traditionally, newspapers have hired the greatest number of photojournalists, but of this number (between 6,000 - 10,000 newspaper photographers in the late 1990s), nearly 40 percent, were freelancers.

The decline of the U.S. daily newspaper during the period 1986 – 2006 illustrates a shift away from reading daily newspapers to the use of multiple sources such as the Internet, cable, broadcast, and radio. Even though there are far more media channels available to consumers than there were 20 years, the number of photojournalists entering the field far outnumbers the opportunities.

Digital Photography

Digital photography is has had an enormous impact of the field of photojournalism. Photojournalists are as productive, resourceful, and creative as ever but digital photography has intensified the process, especially in the area post-production. Photojournalists are now expected to know more and work harder on deadline than ever before. Many photojournalists are their own lab techs and editors now. They stay later on assignments, work from remote locations longer and more often, and are expected to turn around images in an instance. These pressures have transformed and challenged photojournalism.

In other words, the digital camera intensifies photojournalism by increasing efficiency, encouraging creativity and experimentation, and redefining the boundaries of autonomy in the relationship between subject and photographer. The key distinction between film and digital camera use is the immediacy of results and output. The digital camera allows the photographer to see images on-the-scene immediately after capture through an LCD monitor on the back of the device. The immediacy of the digital camera impacts how photographers make images and interact with subjects differently than previously experienced with the film camera. Digital cameras enable photojournalists to review, edit, delete and transmit images immediately after capture. The level of immediacy in digital photography means that photographers do not have to wait for their results to be processed, edited and printed, as previously experienced with film. The digital camera’s level of immediacy takes the guessing game out of photography in terms of content, composition and technique, i.e., “what you see is what you get.”

Photo Manipulation

Altering images to change the meaning of a frame is not at all new to photojournalism. However, what is new is the speed at which manipulations can occur.

The seamless and malleable nature of digital information presents great opportunities as well as challenges for a profession, which prides itself on producing accurate and timely visual reportage. What seems at odds here are the conditions and conventions in which photojournalists engage in photographic routines. Photojournalists adhere to professional codes of conduct that can be observed through the expectations and obligations imposed on individuals by the occupational group. Further, the de-centralization of post-production processes signifies a disruption in previously experienced routines and rituals through the elimination of mechanical processes related to film and print development. Previously, it was harder to get away with manipulation because there were always several other sets of eyes involved in the post-production process. This may no longer be true as seen in the case of Los Angeles Times photographer Brian Walski in Iraq. Even more recently the Reuters debacle over manipulated images from Lebanon points out how easy it is to mislead the public.

Wireless Telephony

In 2000, Swedish telecom giant Ericsson teamed up with camera manufacturer Canon to that will combine the technology of a cellular phone with that of a digital camera. Ericsson’s press statement after the company signed the agreement notes. “This technology will enable simple, fast and reliable transfer of images from digital cameras to wireless devices as well as to other consumers or the Internet.''

For years later, Canon introduced its EOS-1D Mark II with its WFT-E1 wireless transmitter. Along with the tethered LAN, the camera can transmit images immediately back to a server for editing and storage.

According to the Mobile Internet Technology Website, “Already today, digital imaging products and wireless devices are two rapidly growing categories of consumer products, and the merging of these two technologies will create entirely new products and applications, such as multimedia messaging.”

Over time as the technology improves, the ability to transmit images back to a server means that communication between photographer in the field and editors back in the newsroom should improve.

Broadband

Up until lately, the ability to send high quantities of information across the Internet has been limited by bandwidth issues. However, broadband access, the telecommunication frequencies available to distribute  information is increasing rapidly. In 2006, the largest number of boardband subscribers, 57 million users, live in the United States.What this represents for photojournalists is that more markets for images will emerge. At the same, the Internet is still in its infancy in terms of monetizing returns on investments. Even though photographers may benefit from having electronic means of promoting themselves and selling images, there is no guarantee that they will find gainful employment.

Photojournalism's Future Leaves a lot to Consider

The debate over the future of photojournalism has come to a head again as citizen media proponent Dan Gillmor started beating his drum once more. Gillmor's commentary is ruffling a few feathers from professionals and media observers not willing to accept, at this moment, any assessment of the field with the word "demise" in the title. In fact, Gillmor's prognostication for photojournalism is anything but new. For more than a decade people have been talking about the changes brought about by digital photography. However, what is striking here is that Gillmor's tone seems to be taking a much more emphatic quality. For example, Gillmore contends:

The pros who deal in breaking news have a problem. They can’t possibly compete in the media-sphere of the future. We’re entering a world of ubiquitous media creation and access. When the tools of creation and access are so profoundly democratized, and when updated business models connect the best creators with potential customers, many if not most of the pros will fight a losing battle to save their careers.

At the heart of this debate resides a tension between how some people define photojournalism as a professional occupation, and how others define it has an art and self-expression. The problem is that people confuse making pictures with making money. For the average consumer of images questions of aesthetics take second-place to content, especially if the subject is recognizable. How else can anyone explain why a fuzzy and overblown picture of Angelina and Brad on a beach in Africa can command millions of dollars from an agency, while freelance photojournalists risking life and limb in Iraq make barely a living wage.

In many cases, people don't even notice compositional flubs such as a telephone pole growing out of a subject's head.  The average image consumer just looks through or over looks such annoyances. What the average image consumer sees is the center of focus, even with all the imperfections.  At the same time, people aren't idiots. People do  recognize quality and photojournalism offers a lot of it. The conventions developed in photojournalism such as the decisive moment, framing, and layering have helped to make the craft into an art form, even in the eyes of the elite. The average image consumer, armed with a  camera phone,will be hard pressed to replicate a picture made by a trained photojournalist. Unfortunately, the professional photojournalist is being outgunned in terms of the increasing numbers of people willing to send in images for publication.

Gillmor's conclusion reveals the heart of the matter here:

Remember, there was once a fairly healthy community of portrait painters. When photography came along, a lot of them had to find other work; or at least their ranks were not refilled when they retired. Professional portrait photographers, similarly, are less in demand today than a generation ago. But portraits have survived — and thrived.

The photojournalist’s job may be history before long. But photojournalism has never been more important, or more widespread.

There may be a day, when the average Joe or Jan with a camera phone will start to think beyond the snap shot and produce images that are not only of-the-moment. People have the capacity to learn and put knowledge into action. What we may see, then, are people making images  not just of breaking news or spot news scenes of train wrecks and police beatings but also images that have aesthetic appeals as well.

This day may not be too far off, and it is this fear that is troubling many professionals.  As one photojournalist argues on the National Press Photographer Association list-serve, "Hire them, and get garbage images with trees sticking out of back of heads."  Another more rational professional observes, "Eventually, I want to believe, the public and marketplace will again respect that good cameras don't make good pictures. Good photographers do. And good photographers aren't necessarily good photojournalists."

What remains important to the profession as well as to democracy is  the authenticity of the frame and the credibility of the individual who produced the image. As Gillmor argues, "What does matter is the utter authenticity of the image, made so by the fact that the man was there at the right time with the right media-creation gear."

A similar battle is raging in the newswriting world as well -- one in which  bloggers continue to encroach on the domain of the so-called establishment press. But just because someone can blog doesn't mean they have all the facts.

If the citizen shutterbug movement does take hold, as Gillmor predicts, it is reasonable to assume that photojournalism as an art form will continue to thrive, while photojournalism as an occupational group will suffer.

As an educator, this issue raises a lot of questions. Why continue to train photojournalists in a world where just about everyone can claim they are photojournalists? What does getting a degree in photojournalism mean when the credibility of the field continues to be attacked as it did last summer during the Israel-Hezbollah conflict. What does getting a degree in photojournalism mean when opportunities for employment seem so dismal?

The best answer to this question is reconciled by the fact that photojournalism teaches us to experience and see the world in ways that few other disciplines can match. Photojournalism is the practice of being engaged in capturing and fixing moments so that we can learn and grow from those moments. What philosophy seeks to do for helping students to think more critically and ethically, photojournalism does in helping students to see, feel, and act in the world. Photojournalism is a visual response to light and life  -- one that seeks to render, explain, interrogate, expose, and discover what it means to be human.

If more people, with camera phones, come to understand and appreciate the complexities of our times so be it.  At issue is not the need for more people with cameras. What is needed are more people with cameras that know and appreciate the device as a tool for illuminating and edifying, connecting and communicating, the richness of our universal human condition. 

In the end, what appears to be happening now is that far too much energy is being expended on fretting over the loss of a professional occupation and not enough energy is being spent on the implications of an informed and visually literate citizenry. 

Another stark reminder of where photojournalism is headed

A businessman stops in front of the giant Christmas Tree in
New York City's Rockerfeller Center to take a picture with
his camera phone.

Credit: Dennis Dunleavy, November 2006.

The Chronicle of Higher Education is linking to a story about cellphones and news content by The New York Times.

Photojournalism Leaps Into the Cellphone Age

Scott Carlson writes, "At first glance, this is technology news: Yahoo and the news service Reuters are going to recruit the general public as photojournalists — the public that is already armed with an array of image-producing devices, be they high-end digital cameras or simple cellphones."

Pictures from camera phones, taken by the general public can be uploaded to Reuters or Yahoo and then distributed to other news services.

Carlson suggests, "Technology news, yes. But it is also another stark reminder that the media are less us here in the newsroom talking to you, and more of you talking to each other. That shift carries responsibility with it. This is an issue for the liberal arts as much as anything."

If true, this trend supports the general theory that information is more about immediacy and quantity than it is about reflection and critical thinking. Camera phones, in this case, will bring new meaning to the old news phrase "Feeding the Beast."

In their rush to get more and more content into the public domain the question arises as to who will be responsible for editing and vetting this new flood of images. Chief among media shortcomings in recent years has been the lack of oversight in checking the veracity and fairness of images. Some new system will have to be put into place if the "Beast" can be trusted.

 

Photography's Photoblogging Future

For more than a decade now, photoblogging has increasingly become a popular mainstream online activity.  Today there are thousands of blogs dedicated to photography and a handful of read/write web services committed to photoblogging. Professionals and amateur photographers use the Internet in many ways, but the two most common facets of life online comes from creating social networks as well as displaying images to large audiences.

According to David Brooks of Shutterbug magazine, a weblog becomes a photoblog “when a photograph is substituted for a text message or part of a text message, as most photoblogs have some verbal content as well as pictures.”

I conducted a recent poll of 12 randomly selected Flickr members from my own Flickr contact list to help to expand and enrich our understanding of what photoblogging is and how people build participatory social networks through the Internet.

The Flickr members in this study can be described white and range in age from 18 to 60. One quarter were ages 18 – 24, while another quarter were ages 41 – 50. Half of the respondents were female and the majority of the group were college educated. In addition, a majority (66 percent) felt extremely comfortable with digital technology. Further half the group said they use point and shoot digital cameras while the remainder uses DSLRs. Only one member still uses film.

Defining Photoblogging

The respondents in this non-generalized study all pretty much agree that photoblogging to varying degrees uses blog technology to publish pictures instead of words.

As one respondent suggests, photoblogging “Is a great way to let someone peek into your life and what surrounds it. I love looking at photoblogs of people living in other cities or countries where they're showing the small details of everyday life. The designs on fence posts, the way their mailboxes look, trees, sunsets, people walking streets shopping.. etc etc.. News and magazines can only show you so much, but with photoblogs you get a more intimate view of outside your bubble.”

Another respondent defines photoblogging as "An aberration from traditional blogging (if blogging is old enough to establish traditions) in that although it is still conversing on a routine basis with strangers and friends via a web interface (blogging), the primary distinction being the use of visual images shared as the essence of the conversation. Images are worth a thousand words as the axiom goes is at the heart of photoblogging.”


As one photographer notes, “Photoblogging can take many forms, but I define it as using blog technology to publish pictures instead of words. Even if you use words, pictures are you main focus. Pure photoblogging uses just images.”

For Alan Levine, “Blogs are easy to use web publishing tools that allow anyone to create chronologically organized web sites (usually narrowly labeled as "diaries") with built in search and comment features. They are template driven and usually offer a series of well designed layout displays, that can be customized by those with the skills and interest to so.”

Social Connections

As Brooks observes, “Even though the social connection is an obvious and significant motivation, peppered among the snapshots of myriad faces are many, many interesting images which comprise a nonverbal dialog depicting many different, individually experienced worlds, a kind of graphic, off-the-cuff poetry in often abstract colors and shapes, sometimes humorous, cynical, wondrous, or melancholy. It reflects not just the diversity of people in the world, but a plurality of different worlds of experience, thoughts, and feelings.”

The social connections photographers make online through digital photography is doing more for the craft, not to mention the industry, than any other singular advance since George Eastman introduced the Kodak camera in the 1880s. This assumption, albeit a bit grand, suggests that the ease of the digital camera and the read/write web, like the Kodak before them, seem to be closing the gap between amateurs and professionals. Eastman’s strategy was to make photography accessible to those people interested in recording life moments that would otherwise require a professional. In the information/relationship age photoblogging, along with photo storage and sharing sites like Flickr, Photobucket, Ofoto, and Shutterfly, changing the way people make, share, and collect images. Although photoblogging may not be for everyone, Eastman’s mantra, 'you press the button, we do the rest,' seems to resonate in a digitally mediated world.

In terms of social networking, one photographer comments, “I participate in a number of "groups" related to photography. These groups include a general discussion site (utata.org) and numerous flickr groups that address specific aspects of photography. (technical, style, subject). There are individual photographers I admire, and visit with regularity to follow there work. We will comment on each others photos but the discourse is almost invariably photography related. I have not met any individuals in the online community personally although I know such "meet-ups" do occur.”

Pros and Cons

When asked about the advantages and disadvantages of photoblogging, respondents expressed a range of attitudes. One photographer finds photoblogging satisfying because “you get feedback and can share what you're doing with others.” Another said, “With photography you can discover again your own environment, posting it on Internet gives you the opportunity to share your discoveries and learn from others.” For a third respondent, “The primary advantage is that it is a creative outlet and that having the thing forces me to shoot more often.”

Another value of photoblogging seems to come from how people learn from one another online. “I get email from all over the world. People ask me questions about different things and share experiences,” one photographer said. In addition, photobloggers set up special interest groups to share information about their work and experiences. Other photographers feel that photoblogging is a source of motivation to publish and gain exposure.  As one photographer observes, photoblogging “is a motivator. [It]… keeps me going out for walks and shooting. It is a journal of sorts for me...logs my moods and perspective... “

“You see what people like… browse and see what you like in others' photos, and learn from that.”  Ultimately, for this respondent, photoblogging “…is fascinating people watching (the psychologist in me).”

As one photographer notes, “A disadvantage may be the addictive quality of wanting to see just one more image before bed...just one more...It is a real time consuming activity.” Another expresses the concern, “On the down side, I feel like I have to post frequently and sometimes I feel pressured just to put something up, anything at all, if I have not posted in a few days. I also feel like I need to keep taking pictures all the time to help "feed the blog."


Beyond obvious concerns over copyright theft --- something that has plagued the Internet since its inception -- many photographers spoke about issues that appear more sociological in nature. For example, one respondent observes “Another disadvantage may be the culture of "praise" that pervades the photoblogging site I frequent (Flickr).

This may provide an undue confidence when looking at building photography skills.” In addition, another photographer notes, “The temptation to please the lowest common denominator of "crowd taste" is bigger if you use this type of software platform (comments in posts).” Moreover, as a third photographer mentions, “You tend to use the same layout as anybody else because of a number of factors (time, laziness, the customizations still involves to much code which is a deterrent for the uninitiated). - For some types of photo work, customized galleries are a better way to display (but once again the technical aspects of that route forbids it for the majority of people).”

In summary, photoblogging satisfies a person's need for exposure, establishes an online identity, provides feedback, and an excellent application of social networking. At the same time, respondents revealed several disadvantages including, copyright infringement, as well as the addictive quality of feeling the need to post images regularly.

Taking Photojournalism by Storm

Photo Credit: Media Storm Blog showing MSNBC.com Director of Multimedia Robert Hood talking with Senior Media Producer Meredith Birkett after placing a bid on Storm's online auction for the rights to Ed Kashi "Iraqi Kurdistan" project.

For some photographers and teachers who remember the “old days” working with younger generations of creative and ambitious students can be challenging.

Challenging in the sense that there seems so little appreciation for understanding how the process of making images goes beyond pretty pictures and packaging a product.  By process, it should be said that people approached making pictures differently when it required waiting before results could be seen and shared.  In photojournalism, even those the old days -- are well old -- there are still some things that were done that right. One of those things that made pre-digital era unique was the thing that frustrated so many -- waiting and being patience for just the right moment to capture an image.

The liminality of the photographic process – the waiting period between the moment of capture and the development of the latent image – created a mindset that required greater attention to detail. 

Not to over generalize how people make pictures with digital technology, but clearly antecedent practices such as manually adjusting the aperture and shutter speed, wracking in focus, and waiting for pictures to develop, influenced conditions of knowing and being.  With auto everything today we might be gaining immediacy and productivity on the one hand, while losing the art of storytelling on the other hand. Therefore, the question arises, even if technological innovation makes photography cheaper, faster, and easier, are the images demonstrably any better?

Clearly, it is possible to literally point and shoot with remarkably consistent results with digital cameras. Today, even talking about f/stops and focal points with students almost seems moot. Further, more interesting is the fact that this “upstart” crowd is armed with increasingly compact equipment including audio and video capabilities.

In addition to how much the faster, cheaper, and easier photography is becoming, we should also add mobility and multiple platforms to the list. What can’t be photographed with a motor-driven digital single reflex camera and a two-gigabyte card? Instead of telling students to slow down and appreciate the moment when they come into the zone of photographic consciousness, all you can say is “Wow. Where do we go from here?”

New technologies make it possible to tell stories in ways never imagined a few decades ago.

Photojournalists and digital multimedia pioneers such as Brian Storm are on the cutting edge of new trend in creating visual narratives. By joining together of stills, video, and sound this newer form of narrative is creating a market where people are beginning to expect to engage in storytelling that moves beyond the fixed moment of a frame.

Storm’s vision is not just wishful thinking it has become a reality. Last week, Storm’s multimedia company auctioned off the rights to photojournalist Ed Kashi’s story “Iraqi Kurdistan” online.

Media companies from around the world bid on the project during a four-day auction with MSNBC.com placing the highest bid. Not only is the 12-minute piece innovative in and of itself, so to is the way it was marketed to media companies.

You can read more about Brian Storm’s online auction on the American Photo magazine group blog PopPhoto.com or visit MediaStorm online.

Tidbits

Manny Crisostomo, a Pulitzer Prize winning phojournalist has just finished his latest project on overweight teens. This is terrific visual stortelling
and writing and worth a look.

What the Duck

Aaron Johnson's cartoon strip "What the Duck" is a romp. His witty comics about digital photography are insightful and fun.

You don't have to photograph professional sports to enjoy making pictures of peak action.  You can get a lot closer and the fields are generally smaller, there are lots of great opportunities to be made taking pictures of youth sports.

The Digital Journalist deserves a lot of credit for producing a online magazine that keeps pace with the changes in the industry while also celebrating the field's long and productive history. Read Lorraine Branham's piece on how the magazine is becoming a valuable learning tool for visual educators.

Photojournalism's promise to society

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, 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 as well 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 develop the skills needed to capture the decisive moment over many years of 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 perceives as news is predicated on the photographer’s capacity to capture the decisive moment – the peak, climatic, and otherwise dramatic composition representative of the event. However, reducing an event to a single fixed moment in time may 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.

Pretty Pictures or Propaganda?

Photo Credit: Jim Young/Reuters

In a recent survey of blog readers a majority of respondents believe that photo ops constitute a form of manipulation. In the poll (n=380), 22 percent or readers strongly agreed and another 42 percent agreed with the statement "I think photo-ops arranged for the media are a form of manipulation."

It is no secret that a news photograph can convey perspectives, attitudes, and desires more immediately than words. When Yahoo news selected a Rueters image to accompany a story on Bush's conference on school violence, the editors knew what they were doing. The image, a picture made a week earlier in Stockton, California, has all the right stuff. It presents the President in a favorable patriotic light. Using the rule of thirds the photographer carefully frames Bush within a sea of waving flags.

We read pictures literally and symbolically.

 

In this case, the symbolism easily subsumes the literal meaning of Bush and the flags in the frame. In fact, the crowd of people, no telling exactly no many, become secondary information. It's all about portraying a sense of strength and nationalism here. But what does this image have to do with the President's upcoming  conference on school violence?

The trite answer is nothing and everything. The juxtaposition of a week-old photo-op from California on top of a story about Bush's concerns conference are tangential at best. Nevertheless, a careful observer must learn to read between the lines here.

Can images that are juxtaposed against an unrelated text indicate a predisposition on the part of the editors to prime audiences in a particular ideological way?

When Iconic Images Become Meaningless

I read a provocative article this morning from Slate senior editor Dahlia Lithwick concerning the Abu Ghraib prison images -- pictures that once stung the conscience of this nation, and that now have lost their sting.

Lithwick writes with remarkable clarity when she argues that "Yesterday's disgrace is today's ordinary, and that—with a little time and a little help from the media—we can normalize almost anything in the span of a few short years."

In fact, the passage of the president's detainee bill in the Senate will put into law, and make legal, what horrfied so many in the pictures only three years ago.

Remember those incredibly real pictures of naked and humiliated prisoners being the subject of torture? Remember the dog attacking a terrified Iraqi or the guard pulling a prisoner along with a leash around his neck?

What has happened to the power of an image as its becomes stuffed into the recesses of memory? Why do these pictures no longer make us cry or scream with outrage?

With time pictures -- especially iconic images -- come to mean different things for different people. Take the Abu Ghraib prison pictures for example. What these images may mean to many Americans three years later is quite different than what they mean to al Queda operatives seeking new recruits in Iraq.

Terror has a funny way of creeping into popular culture -- just ask Jack Bauer, a.k.a Mr. Torture, of the hit television series "24". Americans have  an freakish fascination with pain and humiliation, especially when it enters the fertile imagination through film, television, and video games.

The War on Visual Credibility

I wrote the following piece last week for a terrific new Website called "Subtitled."

According to editor Phillip Ennemoser, Subtitled is a small group of art students from Salzburg University, Austria. Currently the students are engaged in establishing "a permanent resource for global reportage photography; the focus is on online galleries, portrays of photographers, exhibition, festival and book reviews as well as on a growing network."

Educators thinking about going online to extend learning beyond the four walls of the university classroom might well consider Subtitled as an exemplary model of innovative and engaged learning.

                     

Audience Expectations of Images as Truth

Visual content in news production, over the past 100 years, has been shaped by several underlying pressures, which include but may not be limited to, consumer culture, social tastes, economic and ideological interests, moral and ethical judgments, antecedent practices in journalism, technological innovations, and the social psychological behaviors of news creators and consumers.

In other words, to understand the deeper structural and personal processes underpinning the visual consumption of information as news we must consider a range of behaviors, both of the visual journalist as well as the visual consumer. Therefore, it becomes imperative to reflect on what constitutes a real or truthful representation of an event as displayed, portrayed, and distributed in mass media, be it online or in print. Today, we call upon students, educators, professionals, and the general public to challenge and question all forms and means of media production and consumption, including the array of decision-making processes and behaviors that have been previously left unexamined.

Images consumed as authenticate and representative depictions of reality govern the production of the conventions and traditional standards of content – visual material that is informed and motivated by a individual, institutional, and societal expectations and obligations.

For example, audiences expect news images to be made without the insertion of personal or political bias, and therefore, it logically follows that the journalist may feel obligated to comply. This assumption appears, on the surface, fairly straight forward, but the reality is far more complex and problematic. Visual credibility means that the people who make images, as well as those who eventually view them, establish and maintain an implied social contract of trust, for better or worse. In this case, the social contract between source and user implies a sense of confidence in the authenticity of the process.

Trust , in this case, refers to not only what the audience expects to see in a picture, but also what journalists feel obligated to present. Audience expectations of visual reportage from the on-going conflicts around the world in the New York Times or Le Monde, may differ greatly from those representations aired on Fox News, SKY News, or even Al-Jazeera. What do audiences expect to see when they look at news images in the visual reportage of the news? How practical is it to believe that such reportage could ever be completely free of personal, institutional, corporate, or societal biases?

Although this may appear to be an obvious and naïve line of questioning, audience expectations of how news is framed and socially constructed for us exists on a visual continuum determined by the source ability to engage in a process that maintains facticity, actuality, verifiability, balance, institutional credibility, accuracy, bias, objectivity, and the perceived neutrality of the observer over time.

Until recently, audience expectations of visual credibility appeared to be a seriously under examined area of media criticism. Looking at what different audiences expect to see in news images in terms of efficacy and saliency may help to better predict how visual information contributes to the creation and implementation of major foreign policy decisions.

The credibility of a news source is largely a matter of perception, real or imagined. Audiences imbue a news source such as Le Monde, El Pais, The New York Times or Fox with credibility as something to be valued over long periods of time. Given the rise of increasingly hostile and aggressive elements on the Internet criticizing not just one or two visual news accounts, but the veracity of all images, present inordinate challenges for traditional news sources.

The credibility of news photographs is often based on the assumption that what we are looking at is provided to us as a truthful representative of an occurrence – free from bias or manipulation. Unfortunately, a priori assumptions like this one have fallen victim to the politics of authority – a politics where all images and their sources become suspect. The veracity of the visual in our culture, despite its checkered history, is tied, however, to an even larger culture of capitalism and consumption.

In a state of advanced capitalism establishing and maintaining bases of power encroaches on public trust. Mass media cannot escape the paradox of attempting to earn public trust, while it caters to corporate and political interests. In order to make informed decisions in our lives, there is no substitute for accurate and balanced information. The implications of a public turned against the press because all faith has been lost in its ability to function openly and honesty in society is becoming a dreaded reality.

Sportsshooter Website Features commentaries on digital manipulation

Two weeks ago, I was asked to contribute an article to Sportsshooter, an online community of photojournalists and students interested in sports photography and other matters in the field. Thanks to Kim Komenich of the San Francisco Chronicle and Robert Hanashiro of USA today to allowing me to write more about photo manipulation in terms of what I have been finding on my survey. There are more than a dozen commentaries available on the site and it's exciting to see this level of engagement and concern.  Here's what I sent to Sportshooter:

Digital Manipulation: 'I believe the hiring of freelancers, in this case, may be partially responsible for the mess we now find ourselves in as professionals.'


In the weeks following revelations of digitally altered news photographs from the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict, a great deal of criticism has been aimed at the practice of photojournalism.
 
Those who believe that photojournalism has failed in its mission to fairly and accurately report world events in this instance may feel justified, but is the profession doomed? Can public trust and credibility ever be restored, or was it ever there to begin with?
 
For the purposes of argument I would like to suggest that discussions involving the credibility and believability of photojournalism must be expanded beyond the blogospheric banter of manipulating images in Photoshop.
 
For many scholars, as well as professionals, this conversation remains important, but there is also a need to include other factors negatively influencing public attitudes toward the media in general and toward photojournalism specifically.
 
Photojournalists, in my opinion, must help educate the public to understand an array of complexities comprising visual reportage including, photo manipulation, subject/photographer interaction, as well as the socio-economic pressures facing the media today.
 
For decades, photojournalism has been challenged by the way in which technologies impinge on professional practices and conduct. Beyond technological considerations, however, there are a host of other ideological and sociological factors confronting professionals today. Not only should we be concerned with altering images, but we also must consider how easily photojournalists seem to be exploited by political and business interests.
 
In an on-going survey, conducted for my Weblog, respondents (n=421) reveal a variety of attitudes toward photojournalism.
 
Although not representative of any particular group, the survey calls attention to several concerns that have not completely surfaced in the current debate. Despite the focus on post-production alterations---adding and removing objects, darkening skies, etc., there are other issues involved in the creation of news content that deserve greater reflection as well as public attention.
 
For example, early in the debate, I wrote about how Western news services have become overly dependent on non-western-trained photojournalists for images.
 
Needless to say, this idea did not win much sympathy with professionals who believed that I should just stick to focusing on digital manipulation and not go deeper into the structural issues plaguing the media today.
 
For the sake of this argument, I would like to persist a bit further with this issue since I believe the hiring of freelancers, in this case, may be partially responsible for the mess we now find ourselves in as professionals.
 
Not all professional photographers share the same ideals and values.
 
Specifically, the practice of hiring of freelancers who have access to Hezbollah controlled areas in the conflict were not held up to the same level of ethical or professional scrutiny as their Western competitors. In the race to acquire images with the most impact, wire services put themselves into a difficult, but often very cost-effective, position of paying freelancers who may have political connections and biases.
 
The practice of hiring "in-country" freelancers for images that big news organizations find difficult to obtain for an array of reasons has been going on since the Vietnam War.
 
However, with the immediacy of the digital camera and the ability to transmit pictures instantly, conventional methods of editing and oversight have been set aside. At least this is what we are told was the case in at least two photo-manipulation cases. The practice of hiring freelancers in war zones makes sense to big cost-conscious news sources. Without being overly callous here, in-country freelancers are also seem incredibly disposable when compared to the life of a Western journalist. This is not necessarily a criticism of the individuals who risk their lives daily to provide the West with fresh reportage, but more of an indictment of commonplace business practices used by an industry obsessed with getting images, video, sound, and information on the cheap.
 
While we should condemn photojournalists, in the case of the Lebanese conflict, who mislead the public through poorly executed Photoshop skills; we must also look beyond individual behavior so that we can understand the social, political, economic structures embedded within corporate news organizations that are enabling this sort of behavior. Of course, it is much easier to condemn an individual for an indiscretion than it is to seek to change an entire industry.
 
About the Survey
 
Some of the more interesting findings on the survey to date suggest that a majority of respondents (83 percent) believe they have seen digitally altered pictures in the news within the past five years. More than 95 percent of people surveyed believe that adding or removing objects from a picture is a form of manipulating reality. At the same time, only 55 percent feel that changing the color of the sky to make a picture appear more realistic is a manipulation.
 
Interestingly, nearly 78 percent of respondents confided that a lot more photographers than most people believe have manipulated images in terms of altering content or changing the tone of the picture to make it more dramatic. This revelation, for me, suggests that the people who took the survey have may have become more cynical with the profession then in the past. This same group (88 percent) also revealed that they think news pictures can and do influence foreign policy decisions.
 
When asked if the general public doesn't care if a photographer alters an image to make it more dramatic, more than 70 percent disagreed. Respondents think the public does care if pictures are altered.
 
One of the more surprising results coming out of this study relates to whether people think photo-ops arranged for the media are a form of manipulation. In this small survey, 41 percent (n=131) agree, while another 27 percent (n=81) strongly agree. This means that neatly 70 percent of respondents feel that pictures that are managed and staged for the media are forms of manipulation.
 
Being a person that attempts to connect the dots whenever possible, it seems pretty clear to me now that definitions concerning forms of photographic manipulation need to be expanded upon and clarified by news organizations, professional groups, and the public as well.
 
Without considering the complexities involved in the visual practice of photojournalism that include but are not limited to pre-visualization, image capture, and post-production processes, public confidence in the profession may be impossible to regain in the near future.

Click here to take the survey

For Latest Results on the survey click here.

The characteristics of Photojournalism and ways of seeing the world

The photojournalist’s eye is informed by a principle often defined as the decisive moment. Photographer and artist Henri Cartier-Bresson coined the term "decisive moment" to describe 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.The elements which, together, can strike sparks out of a subject, are often scattered -- either in terms of time and space -- and bringing them together by force is 'stage management,' and, I feel, cheating.

Bresson leaves us much to reflect on in the above passage. For Bresson, the world was about movement, and the photographer's work is to move with the world. However, Bresson was writing and photographing at a time when the techniques of visual reportage were still young and impressionable.

Today, in a world that seems overburdened with visual cliches and not-so-subtle visual anecdotes, much of the meaning of Bresson's decisive moment in photojournalism seems to have become rarefied and denuded of power.

With our collective appetite for "the moment", many news images seem to reduce events down to the equivalent of sound bites. How is the "decisive moment", as a visual phenomenon able to inform the viewer beyond the deft capture of an essence that is nothing more than a mnemonic device?

According to Wikipedia, "Sound bites are a natural consequence of people placing ever greater emphasis on summarizing ever-increasing amounts of information in their lives."

Unfortunately, many photojournalists develop the decisive moment as a  form of visual practice that often becomes formulaic. The decisive moment, in much of photojournalism, appears to be chiefly governed by an individual’s ability to anticipate and react to what is placed before lens.

For this reason, some critics of photojournalism contend that much of the practice is little more than craft, because  much of what is recorded is predicated on the capture of a decisive moment – the peak, climatic, and otherwise dramatic composition representative of the event.

As Bresson reminds us:

"Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes the precise and transitory instant... We cannot develop and print a memory."

In some ways what is most striking about the recent criticisms against photojournalism, particularly in tems of the coverage of the wars in the Middle East is that there is a profound lack of understanding of the field's historic development as well as its sociological qualities in the emergence of media consumption.

It would be silly to apologize for what is happening in photojournalism today as a craft or occupational group, but it is important to point out that the fundamental motivations driving visual behavior have not and probably will not change.

God Bless The Altered States of Reality

What do news diva Katie Couric (above) and a model posing for a picture (below) from one of the latest in a long line of point-and-shoot digital cameras have in common?


The reality is that both images have been altered significantly. We are looking at different forms of manipulation. Both pictures have been digitally altered. The surprise here is that the alterations of the picture showing the model was actually done inside the camera.

Couric's image was manipulated in post-production process to make her look thinner. Couric is in good company. Other celebs such as Oprah Winfry, Martha Stewart, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Kate Winslet have also gotten the Photoshop slim fast treatment during the past few years.

This is the way our culture operates -- women are suppose to appear as waifish as paper plates otherwise men will not find them attractive. Men, on the other hand, are support to look manly -- tough yet intelligent.

When was the last time someone the likes of Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly had a little Photoshop tummy tuck?

Now, with Hewlett Packard's slimming feature everyone can be just like Katie, after Photoshop of course.

In HP's latest sales pitch for its digital cameras there is a series of step by step slides that takes the viewer through the simplicity of the "slimming" feature. Losing weight has never been easier or as surreal.

So, what do Couric and the HP ad hand have in common?

To begin with these two examples illustrate the pervasive nature of image manipulation has become in our culture. Why should anyone care if a news image is altered if they have already have the capacity to mess with just about any picture, inside and outside of the camera?

With the ability to alter reality in an instance with the touch of a button -- the digital camera requires no skill in altering a person's appearance -- I am reminded of the French theorist Jean Baudrilliard's classic work on the notion of simulacra. The term simulacra refers to an unsatisfactory imitation of reality – something where only a copy of something exists. There is no original.

Society has arrived at the age of the simulacrum --  a time where the image, according to Baudrillard:

        Is the reflection of a basic reality.

        Masks and perverts a basic reality.

        Masks the absence of a basic reality.

Bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

Once stripped of its original truth, the sign and the reality it is imbued it with have no equivalence. This imbroglio -- this inability to distinguish fact from fiction -- bears down on us with tremendous force.

Photography as ritual: Part 2

The photograph exists in the world as a real object.

The idea that we can hold on to experiences through the fixing of a moment in time as a photograph is compelling. The act of making images is ritualized by patterns of behaviors.

The social functions of a photograph are diverse and numerous. The social function of the photograph  performs a variety of personal and social needs including the need, to inform, evident, validate, entertain, criticize, report, illuminate, or instruct.

Photography can become a ritualized activity because many of the processes that go into the making of a picture appear automatic and second nature.

At the same time, we shouldn't confuse how the term ritual as primarily been connected to religious ceremony. In this context, we are extending the original ideas about ritual to extend to daily life.

Ever since the Kodak One camera in the late 1800s,  the visual behavior associated with making images have become part of every day life – with one hand we reach for a Kleenex to wipe the tears from our eyes, while with the other hand we reach for a camera to record the moment. There is no denying the emotional associations that move us to document moments in time.

For Catherine Bell (1992),  A ritual may be “described as particularly thoughtless action -- routinized, habitual, obsessive, or mimetic-and therefore the purely formal, secondary, and mere physical expression of logically prior ideas.” In photography, ritual refers primarily to those activities that become embedded in all stages of the picture making process including, pre-visualization, interaction with subjects, composition, technical considerations, image capture, and post-production.

Thinking of photography as an activity guided by embedded ritual -- the interaction between photographer and subject, pose, gesture,  shot, another pose, another shot, edit, presentation – all suggests  patterns of behavior that govern expectations and obligations in the process.

Photographic ritual create conditions of knowing and being.

All of the expectations and obligations associated with the making of a picture illustrate the ritualized nature of photography.

When I make a picture, I expect it to come out, be of reasonably high quality, capture a moment that is meaningful to me, and represent what I am looking at accurately. Therefore, there are certain routines I engage in to make sure that my expectations are met.

In terms of obligation, most of what I feel toward my subject comes through the picture I make. I feel obligated to make a picture that the subject will be happy with (this is in a personal context, not necessarily in a photojournalistic context). I feel obligated to build a rapport with the person I am photographing that honors the individual when possible.

Photography as ritual: Part 1

A Japanese couple, their bride's maid, and photographer, walk through an afternoon rainstorm on the shore of Lake Louise in Canada's Banff National Park yesterday.

Ritualized activities are deeply embedded in human behavior. Although originally used to describe a religious or solemn ceremony, the term ritual today has taken on broader meanings. For the past 150 years, the photograph has played a critical role in creating and maintaining social interactions.

Rituals consist of both technical and social considerations that govern attitudes and behaviors in front of as well as behind the lens of the camera.

Social relationships between photojournalists and subjects constitute a complex symbolic universe of visual rituals. According to Erving Goffman (1967) rituals impinge “upon the individual in two general ways: directly, as obligations, establishing how he is morally constrained to conduct himself; indirectly, as expectations, establishing how others are morally bound to act in regard to him” (p. 49). 

Goffman's ideas are important to consider at a time when photography is undergoing increasing scrutiny and reflection. In photography, extending Goffman’s model of interaction ritual to human visual behavior provides a richer context for evaluating professional conduct and ethical behavior.

Social relationships between photographer and subject are constantly mediated by the expectations and obligations of the individuals involved in the interaction.

Digital photography changes the dynamics of social interaction and human experience in many ways. Among the most obvious dynamics emerging from the use of digital photography is ability to review and share images immediately after capture. Photography may still be a "get-what-you-see" process" but digital photography allows for immediate and repeated corrective processes that were unavailable with film photography.

The rituals in digital photography extend the potential of social interaction beyond what we have been familiar with in film photography. Photographic digital rituals, however, remain situated within cultural practices that symbolically reorganize sensory experience.

The picture still fixes a moment in time, but digital photography appears to extenuate and expand on social rituals both in the capturing of the image as well as in post production processes.

The characteristics of digital photography eliminate sequences in the ritual process of image production. With digital photography the traditional “liminal” period of the latent image—one that transforms the subject into a negative and then back into a positive print—is altered.

Symbolically, the liminal period granted the photojournalist a greater degree of autonomy from the subject. Anthropologist and artist David Tomas (1982) describes this process as the “rite of separation” which is marked by the boundaries of  “electromechanical mediation and optical-chemical consequences” (p. 8).

Historically, the ceremonial ritual of separation in photography consisted of two distinct rites, the capture of an image in a viewfinder followed by processing and development in the darkroom. Therefore, the symbolic transformations of reality occurring between the subject, photojournalist and viewer correspond to face-to-face interaction rituals on one hand, and optical-chemical processes on the other hand.

The ritual interactions of social relationships formed by the use of the digital camera may be very similar to those encountered with users of the SX-70 Polaroid camera. With the elimination of the liminal period in digital photography the ritualized interaction of separation between the photographer and subject also changes.

As previously noted, this dynamic imposes some challenges to the photographer’s epistemic autonomy in capturing and processing images.

What we can learn from how the public feels about digital photo manipulation

Several weeks ago I launched an informal survey on this blog concerning public perceptions and attitdues toward photo manipulation. Relying on email invations and posting notices to other like-minded blogs, some early results confirm a few of the assumptions flying around the Internet these days.

Problems with the survey

First and foremost, this suvey is not a representative sample of a specific group and can make no claims at being conclusive.

The hope here is that this instrument may be used as a tool for directing future conversations about the role of the media in constructing social realities through the creation of news products.

The increasing frequency of digital photographic manipulation in the production of news images demands serious examination beyond the flagellation of the media or the unabashed right-wing vitriol found in the blogosphere. Therefore, no claims of accuracy or predictability can be made here. 

Nevertheless, when I review some of the responses collected to date, there is an interesting pattern developing that would indicate the need for further study and analysis.

Without knowing the demographic makeup of the respondents, many of whom are professionals and educators, there is no way of really drawing any conclusions here.

At the same time, there a few interesting issues to consider given the fact that many respondents believe that news pictures can direct foreign policy decisisions, have heard about or seen examples of photo manipulation with the past five years, and think news organizations need to better monitor the integrity of the images they distribute from the conflict in Lebanon.

Overwhelmingly, respondents do think the general public cares if a photographer alters an image and that digital manipulation is an increasing concern for photographers. Furthermore, a majority of respondents think I the mainstream media is capable of self-regulating itself in terms of manipulating images and that the government should be kept away from attempting to regulate the media.

Finally, another interesting point that comes out of this survey is that many people think that photo-ops are a form of photo manipulation. This should help us look at these issues in new ways rather than limiting discussions only to post-production processes.

The early results (n=338) can be seen online. However,  be careful not to  draw any concrete conclusions here. Instead, use the information as a  way of thinking and talking more clearly about how photojournalism should respond to this crisis.

An undeniable truth: The Internet is keeping journalism honest

In writing about last week's photoshop debacle at Reuters, the Los Angeles Times hits the nail on the head. Ironically, this comes from a newspaper who had to deal with one of its own fabricating reality by combining two pictures to make a so-called better one.

In the article, Tim Rutten makes the point that "one of the undeniable strengths of the Internet and of the blogosphere...." is "...the fact that it is being employed to help keep journalism honest ultimately is to everybody's benefit."

Rutten suggests that instead of waiting for right-wing bloggers to pounch, news operations need to a better job monitoring and policing the images coming out of conflict zones.

This might seem like a no-brainer of an idea, but it also makes good sense considering the impact a photo manipulated image or a staged event can have on a publication.

In addition, Rutten says something that has concerned me for more than 15 years -- outsourcing content to less than reputable sources.

Rutten contends, after running through the gamut of possible explanations for the manipulations, that this:

"brings us to the most troubling of the possible explanations for these fraudulent photos, which is that some of the photojournalists involved are either intimidated by or sympathetic to the Hezbollah terrorists. It's a possibility fraught with harsh implications, but it needs to be examined thoroughly and openly."

Now, let's see if publications get the message.

Open season on photojournalism: Critics have a field day

It's open season on photojournalism these days, and critics are having a field day destroying the integrity of a profession grounded in truth-telling and ethical behavior.

No matter the degree of the infraction, photojournalism, and by association, mass media, is feeling the heat.

Jim Lewis’ scathing critique of photojournalism in Slate.com holds newsgathering organizations to task for the recent spate of problems -- problems ranging from digital manipulation to the staging of news pictures. 

It’s not that these issues have never existed before, but the frequency of the transgressions have placed a profession, photojournalism, under great scrutiny.

The problem with Lewis’ self-indulgent photobash is that he spends a lot of time repeating what others have been saying for some time now. His language is vindictive, which may lead a lot of photojournalists to flat out dismiss his arguments.

Nevertheless, it is worth spending a little time reflecting on some of Lewis’ ideas.

Lewis notes:

It’s beginning to look as if every major institution that prints photos has printed doctored or manipulated photos: Time and Newsweek, the New York Times and USA Today, Harvard University and Science magazine, and the 2004 Bush campaign…. all of them undermine the public's trust in the reality of photographs. And so much the better, because that trust is badly misplaced.

What, after all, do we believe when we believe that a photograph is true?

Susan Sontag, in Regarding the Pain of Others, examines the question: “Who are the ‘WE’” at which pictures are aimed.

This is what comes to mind when Lewis frames the "we" perspective in his analysis.

When it comes to looking at pictures depicting the suffering and pain of others, Sontag reminds us, the “WE” should never be taken for granted (p.7).

There seems to be no denying that the notion of a collective “WE” has changed from the days of our fathers, grandfathers, and forefathers.

For many, the idea of a united “WE” seems inextricably bound to the creation of an US and a THEM. The photographs and words seen and read in newspapers and magazines reaffirm a “WE” that attempts to create the illusion of consensus (Sontag, p.6).

What appears so bothersome to many observers about the recent photo manipulation of burning buildings in Beirut is that manufacture of the “WE” was so poorly executed.

Why did the photographer feel compelled to make the damage appear worse than it was? 

Perhaps the photographer, Adnan Hajj, believed that making the damage appear worse is what his patrons (be it Reuters or Hezbollah) wanted the viewers to see?  This is the imaginary "WE" that operates in the background of human consciousness.

Hajj’s manipulations are failed attempts at constructing a societal “WE”. He just did it really poorly.

The pictures were manipulated to emphasize the US against THEM commonsense viewpoint. The pictures are meant to agitate and solicit empathy, but they are also reiterate mythology (David and Goliath), or peddle an underdog ideology.

Hajj’s picture threatened to pull the curtain back on the ways people perceive the conflict just like TOTO in exposing the all-too-humanness of the less than all-powerful Wizard of Oz.

Bloggers, just like little TOTO, pulled the curtain back on the vulnerability of constructing and peddling one particular truth about the conflict. 

In the political endgames that come with all war, any visual truth  must be suspect, be it by the photographer or a government with an ideology to sell.

The camera may mimic reality but it is the photographer and the viewer that must negotiate the truth that emerges.

The “WE” that is constructed as an image of this war is but part of a larger pretense – something that goads the audience to believe in one view of the experience -- one perspective of reality -- one carefully crafted truth. 

Lewis’ question – “What, after all, do we believe when we believe that a photograph is true?”

Lewis’ question is a taunt -- a wordsmith's turn of a phrase.

Ultimately, there is no such animal as a photographic truth. 

Horrible things happen in the world everyday and there are photographers who record them, but the truth is only believable if we use to make it so.   

The last few weeks have proved to be quite troubling for many observers of the media, especially the field of photojournalism.

The level of public scrutiny now given to images by the general public, especially on the Internet, is unprecedented. Political interests on all sides of the Middle East conflict are holding the social conscious of this nation hostage. Increasingly, audiences are called upon to become more visually literate when interpreting news images. News photography, which at one time maintained at least the perception of validity and truthfulness, is being undermined by a growing throng of disbelievers.

During the first two weeks of fighting between Hezbollah and Israel, media coverage has become suspect as cases of photo-digital manipulation, events staged for the camera, and captioning errors come more fully to light.  One blog, Zombietime, encourages readers to consider the importance of understand how images can be manipulated. The site offers tips on identifying four kinds of photographic fraud and lists the Associated Press, Reuters, and The New York Times as perpetrators.

Zombietime’s analysis of news photography concludes four types of common manipulations:

1. Digitally manipulating images after the photographs have been taken.

2. Photographing scenes staged by Hezbollah and presenting the images as if they were of authentic spontaneous news events.

3. Photographers themselves staging scenes or moving objects, and presenting photos of the set-ups as if they were naturally occurring.

4. Giving false or misleading captions to otherwise real photos that were taken at a different time or place.

The speed and immediacy of the Internet enables critics, on the left and the right of center, to identity, denounce, and defend news imagery that would otherwise go unnoticed by the masses. News organizations are responding to catch and punish any transgressors that undermine the integrity of the Fourth Estate, but they may be too late.   

Dozens of conservative bloggers including, Michelle Malkin, Times Watch, and Little Green Footballs have been relentlessly scouring the Internet to find examples of media manipulation.

A recent analysis of how the media was manipulated after the Israeli bombing of Qana Lebanon illustrates this point brilliantly. In a short video the German news magazine Zapp shows how one rescuer, referred to as the Green Helmet, directs coverage of the events for the international press. Did Hezbollah choreograph the aftermath of the bombing to solicit outrage and sympathy in the Arab world? Many people believe that wide-scale manipulation of the press corps was and continues to be a reality.

Here is a link to a short survey on Photo-Digital Manipulation

 

The big question now is what happens to our historic collective memory if the images we view are continually the subject of disbelief? Will we become a nation of hate-mongering cynics?

For Hardt (1999), “Photographs, like all cultural products, have conditions and contexts that are based on historically determined cultural conventions, forms, beliefs, and perceptions.”

Despite the current uproar concerning the veracity of photojournalistic practices, there is still the question of how these images, manipulated or not, impact foreign policy decision. Is there anyway to truly calculate the impact pictures have on public perception? Was Israel's cease-fire after the bombing of Qana a sign that the government was reacting to outside pressure after millions of people around the world were subjected to pictures of the dead, especially children?

Following how the media covers an issue like the present conflict in the Middle East is a little like watching a tennis match. One side hits the ball and the audience turns its collective head toward where the ball might land. Then, there is the return, and the audience is driven back. This is the way news images are presented to us. One series of pictures showing the news of the day, all of them fairly similar in content.

Washington Post writer Peter Baker (2006) observes, “With each new scene of carnage in southern Lebanon, outrage in the Arab world and Europe has intensified against Israel and its prime sponsor, raising the prospect of a backlash resulting in a new Middle East quagmire for the United States, according to regional specialists, diplomats and former U.S. officials.”

This summer our Violence and Visual Culture class at Southern Oregon University tracked the first two weeks of the conflict in four newspapers. Students counted the number, size, placement, source, and characteristics of the content from July 14 through July 31 in The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Portland Oregonian, and the Medford Mail Tribune.

Some of the questions we were trying to answer included:

Are there significantly more images showing dead and dying Lebanese civilians than Israeli civilians? If so, why? If there are more pictures of dead Lebanese than Israeli would world outcry change policy?

The content analysis conducted by the class examines only the beginning of the conflict -- a period of time when most the pictorial representations of the destruction in Lebanon and Israel occurred.

A total of 186 images in all four papers, with the lion's share (n=105) depicted in The New York Times. 

Sixty-nine images depicted Lebanese civilians, while only 26 showed Israel civilians. In another area, 40 pictures showed Israel soldiers, while two images of Hezbollah fighters and 2 of Lebanese soldiers were used.

Can any conclusions be drawn from looking at images that play on the emotions of viewers?

 

Here are some data (early and unscrubbed) from the analysis. It would be interesting to have an online conversation about the possible implications of the role of images on public perception and foreign policy.

 

Photoshop: Propagandist's tool of choice

The Washington Times jumped on the Reuters bashing bandwagon this morning with an editorial criticizing the news agency for not noticing the obvious retouching of an image this week from Lebanon.

The editorial claims:

The important point here is that Mr. Hajj was doctoring his work for propaganda purposes. Part of Hezbollah's strategy is to outlast Israel until world opinion says the conflict has gone on long enough and it's time to quit with no punishment of the terrorists. As the terrorists in Iraq have figured out, one way to do that is by encouraging or playing up the inevitable civilian casualties. Hezbollah militants hide in Lebanese homes, while Hezbollah sympathizers in the media document the "disproportionate" Israeli military response to rockets fired from "peaceful" battery sites.

If you believe what The Washington Times is saying here, it looks like Reuters not only hired a photographer with poor photoshop skills, but that he is also Hezbollah sympathizer. 

The Times is using it's soapbox to make assertions and draw feable conclusions without any real evidence to support its claim. That's what opinions are, substantiated and biased accounts of some event, person, or thing.

According to Editor & Publisher, Gary Hershorn, a picture editor for Reuters,  believes that the freelancer Adnan Hajj did not manipulate the images for political purposes, but to only "make them better."

This is not the first time Hershorn has had to deal with questions of media bias. In September 2005, Mr. Hershorn edited an image of President Bush writing a note during a UN meeting.  By enlarging the image, the editor was scrunitized for publicizing a very human moment in the life of a very public figure.  With Hershorn's edit the content of the note became clear:
"I think I may need a bathroom break. Is this possible."

Although it would be difficult to say that Hershorn's focus on bringing the president's message into the public sphere, the Lebanonese issue doesn't seem to be making life any easier for the agency, especially in a world that already distrusts the media to a great extent.

Hershorn's defense of Hajj [the photographer in question] seems to steal a page out of the defensive public relations strategy book -- deflect, denounce, and deny.

Not only had Hajj manipulated the smoke coming from burning buildings in Beruit, but blogger Rusty Shackleford discovered the photog added a few extra flares fired from an Israel jet as well. Furthermore, conservative critics have accused Hajj and others of playing along with a Hezbollah propaganda scheme by staging the dramatic rescue of children in Beruit a last week.

To its credit Reuters is trying to respond to all the pressure it has been getting from its critics with what ever good graces it can muster. Editing policies have been tightened, the photographer fired, and all his pictures removed from circulation. Reuter's public apology and its attempts to not repeat the mistakes of the past week are commendable. In the end, transparency is the best defense against distrust and Reuters appears to be taking the initiative in this case.

At the same time, concerns over the ease in which the media can be manipulated by Hezbollah, Israel, or any other interest holder in the Middle East must remain in the public spotlight.

Cloning Lebanon in Context

Here is the photo that has led to a storm of controversy in mass media world, especially in the blogosphere.

According to the BBC, "The news agency Reuters has withdrawn from sale 920 pictures taken by a photographer [adnan hajj],after finding he had doctored two images taken in Lebanon."

Click here to take a survey on photo manipulation.

Despite the reaction and response to the recent manipulation of a Reuters image, many people are missing an important issue.

Over the past few decades the MSM has come to depend on outsourcing many of its most dangerous reporting assignments to in-country freelancers -- people who take far more risks, are paid less, far less educated, and far more likely to be treated like disposable commodities than their Western colleagues.

The big picture issue here is more about the political-economics of doing business in times of war, than it is about one person's journalistic integrity. Let's get this straight. 

One of the most important issues facing the media today is credibility, yet Western wire services continue to utilize labor practices that exploit people.

Shouldn't wire services and the editors who work for them be held as equally accountable to the public as the photographer?

What needs to be discussed here is the reality that our wire services  exploit freelancers who end up assuming all the risk of working in extremely dangerous situations. Consider for a moment the number of Iraqi journalists, many of them working for Western news agencies, that have died in the past four years. In-country photojournalists, be it in Iraq or Lebanon, risk their lives every day so that we can be better informed.

The reality of the situation is that these freelancers are typically paid far less than Western photojournalists, become targets of political reprisals, and are rarely covered by any sort of health insurance policy.

In this case, even if the freelancer is fired and all his or her pictures removed from circulation, the wire services will inevitably hire another freelancer with the same language, cultural, and technological skills to take his place.

Firing the freelancer is a knee-jerk, sort of "cover our butts", reaction to a even more insidious situation that has been overlooked in the industry for decades. Outsourcing what is the equivalent of photo-mercenaries in order to save money and Western lives.

Freelancers need the same training, pay, educational opportunities, and health coverage as any other human being needs in this sort of situation. However, all of this costs money, and the bottom line in the news business these days is pretty much do news fast and do news cheap.

The message that Reuters is sending to the public by firing the freelancer is that they can be counted on to take care of individuals who make them look bad. I feel a deep sense of sadness for the freelancer who probably didn't even know that he was doing anything wrong in the first place.

What needs to the discussed here is the bigger and meatier issue of  how the wire services out source the most dangerous and difficult assignment to freelancers who are more or less treated like a disposable commodity.

Even though Reuters publicly apologized for the picture that got out, where were editors who cleared the image for distribution?  In this case, a first-grader could have done a better cloning job on the image, and at the end of the day it is the editors, not just the photographer, that have failed us. What we need now is an honest discussion about the use of in-country hires and freelancers by media giant who exploit them in order to feed the beast that our insatiable appetite for images in this country has become.

We should not, in this case, be shooting the messenger (the freelancer), but rather the companies that fail to educate their content providers in understanding the importance of balanced, fair-minded, and ethical visual practices.

Why Scholars Should Blog

It is quite clear that there are risks involved in blogging as a form of scholarship in progress -- risks that are more about exposing ideas not yet fully developed than anything that could pass as rigorous academic discourse at this point.  In academe, the old adage "publish or perish" continues to remain a salient mantra for most.

Professors on tenure-track are often warned about the perils of deviating from antecedent practices and traditions that have fairly strict conventions in terms of who will earn tenure. The value of publishing a letter to the editor, for example, is not given the same weight as publishing research in a scholarly peer-reviewed journal. All of this makes perfect sense, but where do professors who maintain active blogs fit in? Many edubloggers spend many hours maintaining blogs, collecting ideas and material, and responding to comments. What is the value of such practices?

As a former journalist, I justify the risks of blogging about academic ideas with the belief that the rewards of engaging people in a broader and deeper conversation about what we see and how things are made to be see is more far more interesting, relevant, and exciting.

The objective of writing in the moment on a blog is about engaging others -- students, teachers, professionals, and the general public -- in a more or less real-time conversation about the impact of images on society.

Some academics argue that scholarly energies are better served if one spends time researching, writing, and sending off articles to peer-reviewed journals. Again this make sense, but I also believe that there is room for both the ivory tower and the soap box in today's media illiterate world. Not only is there room for blogging from an educational perspective, but there is also a tremendous need to train the general public to move beyond a so-called commonsense viewpoint offered up in the mainstream press today. The commonsense viewpoint, in this case, refers to how so many of us refuse to question "news" as presented as "truth" by much of the mainstream media.

Scholars, with years of academic training behind them, are in a unique position to engage the public inside and outside of the classroom in new ways. Through an educational blog, scholars can provide readers with the intellectual tools required to engage in higher levels of analysis  and discourse.   

This past week has been a case study in how effective educational blogging can be. It has also been a watershed moment in my education as a teacher.
 

As I have engaged in a daily analysis of images from the war between the Hezbollah in Lebanon and Israel, several readers have commented on my analysis and even questioned my logic. Good for everyone that have been taking the time to engage in this conversation.

Thanks to Charles who has been graciously challenging me to clarify my interpretation of Whitehead's symbolism, as well as to Karin who asks, "How do you suggest that picture editors choose a picture/s to represent this situation?"

The objective of this exercise has always been about helping myself and others to understand the power of the visual in society. More recently, with the conflict raging in the Middle East, I have become more of an activist in terms of visual literacy. The first step of this process has been to engage others in learning to apply a variety of perspectives to the war of images currently being played out across the front pages of our nation's newspapers.

Transcoding Lebanon:Photographic meaning from one form of coded representation to another

More than 100 newspaper front pages across the United States today visually re-presented Sunday's bombing in Lebanon with only a handful of the same images.  At the same time, 150 others newspapers opted not to use pictures to explain the situation.

There are a few pictures that have emerged as emblematic of the incident. An image of a rescue worker removing the body of a child recovered from the rubble of a building hit by an air strike was used prominently on the fronts of  27 newspapers, while  11 newspapers illustrated the violence by using an image of an angry Hezbollah supporter smashing a large glass window at the main United Nations building in Beirut. Other pictures, such as a man grieving near a pile of bodies, or a rescue worker peering out from the rubble were used less frequently.  Why is it that in a sea of images, only a handful embed themselves in our collective memories.

Only a handful of pictures, mostly showing rescues, signified the news today. A few papers ran images of Israeli troops, but most opted for pictures related to the destruction of the apartment building.

The symbolism captured in these images is fallible. Any interpretation is subject to the fallibility of personal beliefs, emotions, and consciousness. Yet, the fact that someone else is mediating my visual experience leaves me skeptical. Only direct experience is infallible and it is up to me to trust what I am seeing as "real."

Despite the attention paid to how images construct reality for us, we remain dependent on them for meaning. Some newspapers choose to illustrate sympathetically, through the victim's eyes. Others choose to take a more oppositional approach -- one that plays upon our fears with images of retribution and anger.

Why do we need images to fix a moment in time and to mark the passage of an event? Deep within the human pysche symbolism is the language of the soul. In order to make sense of the world through symbolism we must consume objects of desire and fear. Within the photograph is the logic of consumption. We are a culture that communicates through the pictures we create and consume. We learn to see ourselves in the frame, even if the people and objects appear foreign to us at first.

Despite the fallibility of receiving messages implicitly and indirectly we are held captive to our imaginations.

Lebanon Burning: What's Next?

The question of “What Next Lebanon?” was answered just hours after editors at the Washington Post wrote the headline and selected a signifying moment to accompany it for Sunday's paper. However, the “what’s next” has already happened – death and more death, mostly civilians, and mostly children.  Fifty-six people.

It is Sunday afternoon and the news reports from Lebanon are increasingly grim. As I write this post, I imagine the photo and news editors at many of the nation’s newspapers shifting through the hundreds of pictures being transmitted back by satellite across the planet. I imagine how one or two pictures will come to signify what is being reported as the bloodiest day in the two-weeks of fighting being Hezbollah and Israel.

But here we are stuck with the larger rhetorical question -- "What next Lebanon?" and its visual referent. More than 60 years ago, Alfred North Whitehead observed that symbolism is fallible, whereas direct experience is infallible. Yet, we cannot escape the symbolism embedded in words and images of war.

Symbolism is fallible because it works within a system of notions. As Whitehead contends, symbolism can induce actions, feelings, emotions, and beliefs about things.

"The human mind is functioning symbolically when some components of its experience elicit consciousness, beliefs, emotions, and usages, respecting other components of its experience."

The photographer is positioned in such a way as to maximize experience so that the symbolism is both explicitly and implicitly caught in a fragment of time. In Lebanon the symbolism of a devasted urban landscape is often juxtaposed in the Western media against the symbolism of Israeli artillery wrapped in smoke. In Lebanon, a lone figure negotiates his or her way through an agonized frame of twisted, smoldering metal. The symbolic, however, is socially and culturally constructed and must therefore be learned to make any sense.

The symbolism of "What Next Lebanon" anchors in our mind an image of the past, present, and future. We read through the literal nature of the picture presented to us to make inferences and associations. This is the way our mind works. We have a catalog of images in our memory banks to draw on -- Kosovo, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Haiti, El Salvador, and this latest picture of Lebanon burning no longer surprises or shocks us.

Doctor, Doctor: Another tale from the darkside of digital photo manipulation in photojournalism

Award-winning Charlotte Observer photojournalist Patrick Schneider has been fired.

Today, Rick Thames, the paper’s editor, dashed off an apology for his readership, while summarily firing Schneider with a curt one-line dismissal.

According to Thames:

In the original photo, the sky in the photo was brownish-gray. Enhanced with photo-editing software, the sky became a deep red and the sun took on a more distinct halo.

Thames’ action is as much about saving face in an industry plagued by public distrust than it is about cleaning house.  Given Schneider’s history with prior questions about manipulating pictures, Thames didn’t have much of a choice – the incident just gave him an opportunity to stand on the pretense of upholding journalistic integrity.

Just about the only thing a newspaper has left to court readers is the sense that what gets published is reported as accurately as possible.

Schneider’s predicament is less about misleading readers and more about misjudging editorial oversight.

This isn’t the first time Schneider has gotten into hot water for doctoring pictures. In 2003, the North Carolina Press Photographers Association (NCPPA) stripped Schneider of several awards he won for news pictures after the organization had determined excessive adjustments were made to the backgrounds of images.

Thames’ reaction to this current incident is one based primarily on fear.

The chief concern here is one of maintaining a perception in the public’s eye that journalism is somehow bias-free, and those that break from proscribed norms will be punished.

It is interesting to reflect on just how limited our understanding of what counts for journalistic ethics in this country. Editors use a rather narrow definition that applies mostly to the practice of constructing and correcting images. What the public isn’t privileged to is how assignments are conceived, what constitutes news, and how news is constructed for us.   

Editors are conspicuously sensitive when it comes to the altering of pictures in Photoshop, but hardly raise an eyebrow when the pictures produced are actually sophisticated visual constructions, i.e., photo-ops,  that push a particular agenda. Isn’t a “grip and grin” or “shin plaster” picture a type of manipulation as well -- be it the grand opening of a local hardware store or the kick off of some governor’s race?

Photographers are constantly being manipulated by political and economic interests, yet the only time they risk getting fired is when they refuse to cater to the overbearing demands of a public relations flack.

The big question now is whether or not the punishment fits the crime.  Unfortunately for Schneider, the editors may be applying antecedent conventions to a medium that is constantly changing. The guidelines for what is acceptable in terms of post-production processes were drawn from previous practices that may no longer be all together relevant in an age of the seamless digital workflow.

What was Schneider up to when he adjusted the colors to reflect what he thought he saw through his lens? Tweaking the color to enhance the narrative qualities of images may be thought of as something akin to how a writer may use an adverb in a news story. Adverbs are generally those descriptive “ly” words that can get writers into trouble for injecting personal opinion.

What Schneider was doing to his image was adding a few “ly” words to a frame that may not have been as lively as it could have been. Where were the editors before the picture was published? Shouldn't they also be held accountable for letting the picture slip through the fact-checking process. Was Schneider's sky a misrepresented fact or a metaphoric device?

The editors believe that Mr. Schneider's manipulation of the image was in violation of the newspaper's policy on accurately reporting the news. Do using adverbs in a news story change the accuracy of a story? Not always, but they often do express the writer’s personal opinion.

What is clear to me is that the editor, not the photographer, has the ultimate power as judge and jury when it comes to determining what is real or not real in the newsroom. Somehow Schneider, by adjusting the color of the sky, allowed his opinion to creep into his re-presentation or interpretation of a news event just like a writer may have the urge to fatten up a thought with a few extra adverbs or descriptive adjectives.

Apparently, the editors in Charlotte are serious about holding feet to the fire when it comes to hyperbolic and excessive expression – textual and visual.

In this case, Thames may feel that he is protecting the interests of the newspaper by dumping a photographer who stepped a little too carelessly across the slippery ethical morass of news judgment, but then again, he may have only won a skirmish, not the war. Instead of firing Schneider, maybe the newspaper should invest in a little re-education, sort of like what you have to go through when you get a speeding ticket. Nevertheless, what is clear is that Schneider pushed the limits, and his luck, just a little too far this time.

For more on this story see:

Editor & Publisher

Metafilter Community Weblog

Seeing Red

The sun sets over the Siskiyou range Sunday evening as walkers take advantage of the cooler temperatures before nightfall. Daytime temperatures in Ashland, Oregon topped 105 degrees, but the heat also helped to make the sunset spectacular.

Pictures are force worth thinking about

In the war of words that coincides with every foreign conflict, it is the visual impact of images that is remembered most. Our collective memory  is organized by the recognizable, and often stereotypical, depictions of destruction and death.

Chris Hedges national bestselling book, War is a force that gives us meaning , that war creates its own culture. “It dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language, and infects everything around it, even humor, which becomes preoccupied with the grim perversities of smut and death.”

Hedges understands the attraction of war as an inevitability -- something that adds purpose, reason, and meaning to life. “War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface within all of us.”

What we see in the scenes of suffering and carnage in the Middle East may be considered an obscenity on one hand. However, the images are also part of a mythmaking process – stream of visual messages sold to us by politicians, generals, historians, filmmakers, writers, and even journalists (Hedges, p. 3).  The mythmakers, according to Hedges, bestow war with qualities such as “excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty.”

Pictures of war are all of these things and there is a sickness in them that we have seen many times before. In the continuing crisis in Lebanon, for example, apparently the United States media appears to be presenting a very different picture than its counterparts around the globe. Recently, a few commentators have taken note of the disparities in how the conflict is between covered by the U.S. media than it is by the rest of the world.

Washington Post writer Jefferson Morley has been keeping track of what the rest of the world has been saying about how the Western media’s coverage of the crisis dramatically differs from the rest of the world.

In his analysis, Morley quotes from an article in the Lebanon Daily Star by Marc Sirois criticizing the highly sanitized versions of the news in the Western press. According to Sirois: “The vast majority of Western media reports do not accurately portray the fact that the vast majority of the dead are civilians, most of them women and children….For the most part Western television viewers, newspaper readers, and Web surfers are reading highly sanitized versions of the news, spun in such a way as to dilute the brutality of the Israeli onslaught and especially to ensure that blame is placed squarely on Lebanon in general and Hizbullah in particular.”

What Morley and others seem to want us to think about is how the U.S. media spins a more sanitized version of the news without the audience ever questioning the coverage. 

In his essay, Morley compares recent news reports from U.S. media with those of European news outlets. Apparently, the reportage is pretty skewed and reflects the foreign policy interests of the U.S. in the region.  Morley discovered that while the U.S. media focused predominantly on the evacuation of U.S. citizens from Lebanon this past Wednesday, European news agencies were reporting the increasing number of civilians being killed in the conflict.

Pictures from this past week playing up the evacuation of U.S. families from Lebanon in the news media support this claim.  At the same time, the killing of Lebanese civilians, especially children by Israeli air strikes was downplayed. Morley concludes, “The disparate reaction to Lebanon's civilian casualties may simply reflect the larger beliefs of the societies in which journalists work.”

At this point, we should reconsider what exactly is the work of journalists. Is it a journalist’s job to inculcate readers with particular tastes, values, and ideologies? As a journalist, turned educator, it is impossible to not to think about how news decisions are made. 

Increasingly it is clear to me that the events that shape what is determined to be news are interpreted through a complex array of filters -- personal, social, professional, institutional, cultural, and even political. The importance to journalism, and ultimately public confidence in the press, is that we should be able to recognize and acknowledge our biases and make transparent the processes in which news is gathered and presented.    

Pictures that Stick

It is a curiosity that in a world that is literally bombarded with visual images, the front pages of many newspapers in the U.S. are fairly consistent in displaying nearly the same pictures. When it comes to representing the "big" international news events in terms of the thousands of images that are produced daily typically a couple of images seem to be played over and over again on front pages.

We saw this happen yesterday when a majority of newspapers opted to run one or two of the same pictures covering the evacuation of U.S. citizens from Beirut. The two most iconic images used yesterday stand out because they are more or less benign in terms of the conflict. The media turns its lens away from the bombing of the past week to focus on what it thinks Americans need to know. The bombings persists yet the recounts the major news of the day through an iconization of events in one or two pictures.

The pictures displayed across the front pages clearly possess emotional and aesthetic qualities, but are they truthful to the complexities facing the Middle East at this moment in time. Where are the images from Afghanistan and Iraq?

Looking at the pictures above, the first of the two most used images shows children dressed in flight helmets. In what appears a theatrical moment the children are prepared to escorted out the country. No matter what, editors know that pictures of children and animals always  evoke the strongest emotional responses from viewers.

In the second image, a shilouette of soliders loadinng a cargo plan is backlight by the setting sun. This image works because of its graphic, rather than its emotional appeal.

In terms of cultural hegemony, it is fascinating to take notice of the fact that so many newspapers across the country seem to single-mindedly select pretty much the same image to represents the "big" news of the day. 

Let the victims be seen and known

Yesterday, I wrote about the predictable pattern of images we can expect to see during the early, middle and later stages of modern conflict. As I surveyed the front pages of more than 500 newspapers on the Today's Front Page Website I was struck by the conformity of the image selection and display. 

I am bringing this up again because I was stunned by how only two newspapers chose to empathize with the victims by showing tight detailed pictures of a grieving woman and an injured child.

It should be noted that a majority of U.S. newspapers selected not to use any images from the crisis in the Middle East on the front page. Those that did run chose to focus on wider angle images that serve to provide a context for understanding the destruction.

This brings us to challenging and confounding claim that the media in this country is ultra liberal. Contrary to popular belief, most of the treatment of front page image selection is pretty conservative.

It takes courage for newspapers to select images that put a human face on the front page. Most of us don't want to be reminded of the true cost of war -- civilian deaths.

What is really interesting about how the use of violent imagery plays out incrementally as the war progress is that just as predicted today's coverage is saturated with images of refugees fleeing the conflict.