The Single Image is Dead.
It’s a scary thing being a photo-journalism major in college. Photography has no money in it. Journalism has no money in it. I have no money, and that won’t change for a long time. In an effort to stay ahead of the curve, I’ve come to a few conclusions about photojournalism. My first conclusion(?): the single image is dead.
Traditionally, photojournalism students built a portfolio of roughly ten single images and a ten-image photo essay. This could vary wildly across portraiture, sports, illustration and documentary work, but the basics were the same. However, I think we are seeing a major shift in the idea of single images and a portfolio built around them, here’s why.
With the advent of camera phones, advanced camera technology and citizen journalism, the ability to take a great image has become much easier. Thanks to auto-focus, auto exposure and the immediate ready-ness of a 3-megapixel camera phone, photographers are often being beat out to breaking news by citizens themselves (even if they don’t consider themselves citizen journalists). The aforementioned equipment helps everyday-people capture what they are seeing, with decent quality. Even the best Johnny-on-the-spot photographer can’t beat a person who is at the scene when it happens.
The perfect example for this: the flight landing in the Hudson back in January. Numerous iPhone photos made A1, main-photo holes across the COUNTRY(!). Photojournalists couldn’t get their quick enough. Period. People were already at the scene when it happened, cameras recording all of it. It isn’t a matter of those people wanting to be journalists, it’s a matter of the natural human inclination to record and remember what they see/hear/experience.
Newsweek has acknowledged this in a very telling way. In their explanation for the magazine’s re-vamp, they made clear that in the new age of journalism, getting photojournalists to breaking news scenes was unrealistic and expensive. Instead, they said that when they did decide to cover weekly, breaking news, they would use the wire services, who are (just so coincidently) tapping into those citizen journalists.
What’s more, these technologies are only going to increase in quality and ease of use – people taking print-worthy photos, whether we like it or not, is going to increase – and tight budgets at papers and magazines are going to take advantage of that. Why send a photographer to the city picnic when readers can send in their photos directly to the paper from their phone and see it on the web in five minutes?
For the photojournalist, the single image is dead. Anyone with a Canon Rebel or iPhone can produce a ‘singles’ portfolio now.
So, where does this leave photojournalists? It leaves us with raising the bar, and producing high quality work. This is something I could not be more excited about, something I could not want to be more apart of.
We will need to display our talent and passion for images in different ways – documentary work, portrait series, multimedia etc.
You have a passion for visuals and photography- prove it: devote the time necessary to follow great stories. Display your commitment to your craft and your subjects. Prove to the viewer you should be paid to make images by creating high quality photo essays, with excellent execution of framing, layers, composition, color, motion light and shadow. Prove that you are better than the average person with their iPhone with time and skill. Push yourself to expand your horizons – shoot video (super fun to do!), collect audio (ask 20 people one question and take their portrait!), re-invent how you explore stories and our visual world.
I predict that the new portfolio will be all-photo-essay based, with multimedia accompanying. This is a good thing. The quality of our product will rise, our skills will increase and we will be more happy to be producing stories that are worth telling.
And anyway, who ever liked going to the city picnics?