How To Save Photojournalism

This just in! Jesus and his pals had dinner last night….. full story at 11.

Last week, Dirck Halstead ran a very provocative piece in his Digital Journalist asking How To Save Photo Journalism.

The answers were more depressing than the question, because at the end of the day, the answer came down to, pretty much… um, how about a non profit foundation underwriting it.

Well, this will not last long.  And it is no solution.

But the article and the ensuing discussion online made me think long and hard about the future of photojournalism, because as photojournalism goes today, so television journalism and video journalism will go tomorrow.

I think the answer to Dirck’s question is not to be found in foundations or non-profits at all, but rather in the world of painting, because in fact, we have been here before.

Photo journalism, for the many men and women who do it on a daily basis is a craft. It is a way that they earn a living. In the ‘old days’, publications from newspapers to Life and Newsweek or Time (not to mention National Geographic) used to send out their photographers to cover the world.

It was a great, great job. But it was a craft.

It was a craft that slowly, and only recently began to become regarded as an art.

In 1955, photographer Edward Steichen convinced the Museum of Modern Art to mount an exhibition of photographs, most of them photojournalism actually, called The Family of Man.  It became not only a big hit at the Museum, it also gave photography a place amongst ‘Art’; something it had never had before. 

Painting, ironically, followed the same path, only a lot earlier.

Prior to photography, painting was much more a craft than an art. 

One might become a painter and spend his life working in what we might call the commercial world.  Painting portraiture for middle class families; painting weddings; views of houses and so on.  It was not so much ‘art’ as commercial work. That is actually what the vast majority of painters did for a living.

Even the most successful, people like DaVinci or Michelangelo or Carravagio were in fact the ‘Life Magazine’ photogs of their day.  They were generally commissioned by The Church to ‘record’ the biggest news stories in history – The Last Supper, The Annunciation, The Creation. Take a look at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It is the Life Magazine special to end all Life Magazine specials.

The advent of photography – a cheap, efficient and perfect way to record weddings or portraits or what your house looked like, pretty much destroyed the commercial painter business.

Photography did to painters what the Internet is doing to photographers.

Painting however, survived. Thrived in fact, but in a different incarnation.

Painting moved 100% into the Fine Art world. And it hasn’t exactly hurt it.

Just ask Robert Rauschenberg or Andy Warhol if they are starving artists!

I would love to buy a Chuck Close painting. I just don’t have  spare $3 million floating around.

Prior to the invention of photography, Chuck Close would have been a ‘portraitist’, getting a few thousand bucks for his work.  Today – millions, as fine art.

OK.

So here is where photography in general and photojournalists have to wise up.

The answer is not to go begging for a few pennies from some Foundations – ‘Oh please, please, please support a photojournalism project”.

No.

Photojournalism must go where painting went 100 years ago.  Into Fine Art, boldly and decisively. And don’t look back.

Great photojournalists can create some of the worlds most iconic and most moving images.  Just look at the work of Sebastao Salgado.  

You know the work of Nick Ut, who took the photo in 1963 of Phan Thi Kim Phuc running down the road burned by napalm. It’s iconic.

It’s remarkably powerful and deeply disturbing.

The Pieta, in its day, was also remarkably powerful as well as deeply disturbing.

It is art. 

It is art as much as was the Pieta.

And it should be marketed and sold as such. 

Instead it was shot for the AP and sold for pennies.

Photography – photojournalism as Fine Art can find a ready market in a world hungry for art, but unwilling or unable to pay millions for a single print. (and that is not to say that that does not happen.  Look at the photography of Andreas Gursky.  $3 million + for a single print.  I would buy one if I could.

It is the ‘Last Supper’ of our time.

Gursky points to the future of photography and photo journalism, and the ultimate salvation of photojournalists.

The days of going out to shoot the local fire for the local newspaper are over. Sadly, so too are days of going out to shoot Iraq for Time or Newsweek.  

But the days of capturing great and powerful images and exhibiting them in galleries and museums and selling a limited run of prints (what after all are Rauschenberg lithos or Warhol silkscreens), are just ahead

if…

if photojournalism can manage the transition from craft… to art.