Monday, December 1, 2008

Do professional photographers have a place in the face of citizen journalists or are they destined to become disinter-mediated?

I am sticking with the main question I had posted in my blog last week. I have written a lot on the subject for my paper already and am so committed. I have a couple of new sources that I am considering, however, one of them is a book by Susan Sontag called "On Photography" so you will have to but it or check it out of the library to read it. The other is a recent program played on NPR/MPR called "On The Media" called "Snap Judgments" in which they covered the story on Jill Greenberg--the portrait photographer for "The Atlantic" This news program was seeded by the Greenberg photographs, but it was more a survey of portrait photographers, which touched on a number of subjects that I am including in my paper. It shows the power of the photograph, the responsibility of the photographer, and the falsehood of the photograph. It also shows how important and tricky ethics in photojournalism can be. It leads of course to the question of how well citizen journalists can work within such a structure. Greenberg knew what she was doing—she knew how to make McCain into a pariah, and chose to make that photo whether ethical or not. What does that mean for citizen journalists who may do such a thing by misunderstanding the medium's power to distort reality? What of the readers who approach a trusted news source to get the news only to get an accidental distortion instead of a conceived interpretation of the news? Who is better to make these interpretations than those who know the rules and break them or those who don't know the rules in the first place?

Here is the audio from that program:


Another recent source is one I found from Professor Iggers' email a while back regarding Vincent LaForet's writings on the state of photography. In that article, he made reference to another article called "The Cloud is Falling" which is helpful in its reference to the parallels between the music industry and photography which will no doubt be a part of my final paper.

2 comments:

Kathy said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Kathy said...

Aaron -

Thanks for posting this.

I don't know how much it helps, but you can see Jill Greenberg's work on her website: http://www.manipulator.com/