Picture Stories

"A picture has no meaning at all if it can't tell a story"

-Eetu Sillanpää

Beautiful words.

This week's lecture was about the other side of journalism- pictures. Bruce talked about pictures from their origin, to modern photojournalism- photoshop, news photos and moving pictures (new television). Now, it comes as no surprise that pictures are incredibly important in modern journalism. They are everywhere; newspapers, magazines, television, movies, graffiti, ads, computers. You just need to take a look at 99% of all Tumblr blogs and you can see that everyone is a photo journalist today. Because people like seeing pictures. It makes it easier for us to understand what a story is about, to place ourselves in the midst of an event.

The lecture explained how news pictures have developed through the ages, from cave drawings of events, to stained glass windows, to illuminated letters and more modern drawings published in newspapers. I find it rather romantic to think of the ways people have communicated pictures in the past. So much effort and talent into a immortal drawing, and now all of that happens at the click of a button.

Pictures soon developed to photographs in newspapers. The first published photo was by Henry J Newton in 1880 of Shantytown in New York. And we all know the rest. Now the problem is not taking a photo, but choosing a photo out of the million we are bombarded with. Photojournalism has escalated so quickly to be dominated by photos taken will iPhones, iPods, cameras, Canon's, Nikon's, surveillance footage, heaven knows what else. Imagine what it will be like in another 100 years. Holographs? Engraved gold? Singing cherubs? Teleportation? It is actually quite scary.

And now it is not only about taking the right picture, but it can be adjusted in whichever way we want because of the double edged sword called Photoshop. (<<< click it, I dare you)

Bruce showed this amazing example of the power of photoshop:

How shocking is it? That anything can be so subtly altered, that we as consumers would not even notice. As I have heard some people mention- no wonder women have so much trouble living up to media-beauty- it does not exist! This is why I miss (not that I was around for it, but nostalgia is my friend) the golden days when it was film camera developed in a dark room and smudged onto a newspaper page. Or hours spent on drawing a picture to resemble a person for a news story. It might have taken longer, but this modern power has me squirming in my seat.

Does anyone else find it uncomfortably similar to dystopian predictions? 1984, anyone? Brave New World? Fahrenheit 451? Hunger Games? That the natural, normal is not sufficient enough, that it needs to be altered and transformed into something unnatural to make it socially acceptable. Shivers.

Here are some examples of photoshop images that have been greatly misused:

Missing leg anyone?

Bruce showed this one in the lecture. I find it rather sad that she needed to be enhanced to be commercial in America. Also, I find it kind of funny all the same.

This one was actually a combination of two photos that made the e-mial forwarding rounds a few years back.

This one is rather disturbing. Someone photoshoped a tourist into a shot of the planes flying into the Twin Towers. Rather a dark side of photoshop, I think.

There is a whole list of other photos like these on The Guardian website.

Evil photoshop aside, to have a good news photo you need to think of:

>Framing

>Point of view

>Exposure

>Timing

>Capturing that elusive moment

Here is an example of one of the most famous photos:

This was taken by Kevin Carter, a South African photojournalist. He won a Pulitzer Prize for it. I think this is a perfect example of how a picture can say more than any amount of words can. And I am a huge believer in words. But nothing can convey the message as strongly as this one picture can.

And with that I will end this exceptionally long post. Pictures have a power, sometimes, that cannot be expressed in words.