Download HO What is photojournalism

HANDOUT TOPIC: Photojournalism
by Mark M. Hancock
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What does it take to be a great journalist?
A great journalist cares about people and an ideal world. A great
journalist can approach a topic as vast as the universe and make it simple
and interesting to both Einstein and the new immigrant, who is trying to
learn the language.
The written word has power. With skill, reporters can expose the dark
deeds of the world and bring them into the light. However, journalism is
limited to non-apathetic, monolinguistic people with some time to kill
and a few neurons still firing.
Enter photojournalism. It destroys almost all barriers. Justice can draw
its sword in the time it takes an eye to scan an image. An image has no
age, language or intelligence limits.
What is a photojournalist?
A journalist tells stories. A photographer takes pictures of nouns (people,
places and things). A photojournalist takes the best of both and locks it
into the most powerful medium available - frozen images.
Photojournalists capture "verbs." This sounds simple, but a room of
professional photographers was dumbfounded by this realization. Even
after a full-length lecture with documentation and visual evidence, half
of the photographers still had no clue what the difference was.
At the end of the presentation. One man said (he really did), "So, what's
the difference between photography and photojournalism?" Luckily, two
people (only two) turned to him and yelled, "Verbs!"
Although photojournalists can take properly exposed and well composed
photographs all day long, they hunt verbs. They hunt them, shoot them
and show them to their readers. Then, they hunt more.
A photojournalist has thousands of pairs of eyes looking over his shoulder
constantly. The readers are insistent: "What are they doing?" "What did
you see?" and "What happened?".
The readers wake PJs up at night. They keep PJs awake. The eyes always
want to know what they missed. Readers can't see what they missed with
a noun. It works if the question is specific enough (what did the
condemned building look like?), but most answers require verbs.
To tell a story, a sentence needs a subject, a verb and a direct object.
News photos need the same construction. Photojournalists tell stories
with their images. Also, words are always used in conjunction with
photojournalist's images.
The words below a photo are called a cutline. I write the cutlines that go
with most of my images. At many newspapers, photographers provide
names and nothing else. They don't write cutlines because they
sometimes can't write a lead (lede) graph for a story. They also may not
be able to photograph a sentence (sports being the exclusion, and there
are plenty of supporting images to prove my point in this genre as well).
To be a photojournalist, we must understand the relationship between
the image and these basic elements of language (all languages worldwide).
The girl hits (or misses) the ball. There are no other options.
The girl is easy to photograph. The ball is easy to photograph. The verb is
the hard part.
As a servant of the citizens, it's the photojournalist's OBLIGATION to
capture the entire sentence involved in EVERY event. There are no
excuses. It's hit or missed. Some photographers don't care. They have a
picture of the bat. "Hey, that's what tried to hit the ball." They just don't
get it.