And so
sweetly
fatally
I have decided to construct
with all my songs
an endless bridge to dignity
so that one by one
the humiliated of the earth
may pass.
Roberto Sosa²

Without the photojournalist, news as we know it would not exist. On the surface the job of the photojournalist seems simple enough -- to produce credible and effective documentation of important events in the world. But the journalist's photograph does more than merely depict what we understand as news; it creates it as well. It is the photographic gaze per se which designates an event as news and which confers on it significance, legitimacy and public status. An undocumented event is not news; it has no currency in the public view and no function as information; it is simply an occurrence -- transient and local. And the conditions under which the journalist's photograph is produced and used are complex and contradictory; the individual motivations of a journalist, the economic interests of the news industry, and the aims of the government are not identical, nor are they formulated in any systematic manner which might make them generally visible or comprehensible. In addition, the photograph itself works on the viewer and within the culture in ways which remain largely unanalyzed.

The journalist must live with one question: "What's the news?"³

For the majority of working photojournalists, news is the daily beat. They chronicle a continuing series of minor-to-moderate disruptions of the social order -- crimes, accidents, riots, strikes, fires and floods -- and affirmations of that order -- campaigns and elections, ceremonies, celebrations, sports, entertainment and the ubiquitous "photo opportunity" which provides carefully staged access to public officials and other celebrities. In this venue the photojournalist creates an iconography of peak moments excerpted from, emblematic of, and reinforcing familiar experiences. In fact it is precisely the familiarity of these images which constitutes their value as information. They provide a formula for presenting the events of the world " . . . in standardized patterns. We have forgotten how we learned these patterns or even that we learned them at all."⁴ Their reiteration of themes -- conflict, victory, defeat, pain, death and human strength -- reassures the reader/audience that even under the assault of disruptive forces our society is structurally sound and secure.

Most public attention focuses not on this corps of routinely assigned photojournalists, however, but on the relatively small number who provide witness to acute crises, major social upheaval and other disasters -- wars, civil unrest, destruction by man or nature. Their traumatic images have become our primary experience of the most important and most volatile world events; this documentation is a visual assault upon the audience. But even the most awesome suffering or destruction loses impact with repetition. And, as public appetite and media economics demand ever more immediate and more intimate reportage, the photojournalist has ceased merely to observe events, and has become a participant. Caught in a crossfire of bullets and ideologies, as much author as reporter, the contemporary photojournalist can no longer rely on aesthetic guidelines to answer questions of political, moral and ethical import. Whose side are "we" on . . . and who are the "we" for whom the images are intended? How is the relevance of gathering photographic data weighed against the potential for sparing lives and alleviating suffering? Where is the line to be drawn between the public's "right to know" and the subject's "right to privacy"? How is journalistic "objectivity" defined by a white, middle-class American photographing a destitute Salvadoran village, a ravaged Lebanese refugee camp, or an enraged Miami ghetto?

Because very little in the training of the typical photojournalist addresses structural social, economic or political issues, the photojournalist under fire must rely on intuition, instinct, conscience and the lessons of experience to analyze and interpret quite complex events:

It is important to record what's going on, but it's also important to make sure that you're covering the news and not becoming part of it. The camera always manages to stir up the crowd.
-- Bill Frakes⁵

My interest is in the situation! I prefer the naive approach. I want to learn from the situation and I want my photographs to reflect what I've felt.
-- Mark Godfrey⁶

I recalled that another photographer turned . . . and said "we live for this kind of stuff."
-- Robert Stella⁷

I saw a world which defied rational understanding . . . reality became valid only when I became part of what I was photographing.
-- Eli Reed⁸

I think it was our job to report all that happened.
-- Horst Fass⁹

If your pictures aren't good you aren't close enough.
-- Robert Capa¹⁰

No matter what values or attitudes govern the production of the journalist's photograph -- whether decisions are made by an "objective" professional, a callous adventurer, or a committed advocate -- the use of the photograph is determined by the agency or print/broadcast outlet which purchases the image. Eminently susceptible to quite different interpretations of the same event, the journalist's photograph is ultimately employed in a discourse written by the news and information industry.

Journalists and the public need to acknowledge that the business nature of American journalism affects its ethics.
-- H. Eugene Goodwin¹¹

The nature of American journalism is contradictory at best. The news media exists to provide the public with accurate, reasonably objective news, and clearly labeled editorial opinion; they mus also show a profit to corporate owners, stockholders and advertisers. Since the audience of the news information is also the source of income for the news business, the news delivered must not compromise the status of the audience-as-consumer. While journalistic ethics undoubtedly prevent most actual tampering with the factual data of the news, it would be naive to assume that editorial framing of that news would do anything to negatively affect productivity or profits. Thus the news is presented in a neutralizing context, as a variety of product packaged in recognizable and easily digested bits which can be integrated with bits of advertisement. In such a format the journalist's photograph provides a convincing proof of an event without raising awkward questions about its cause, or scrutinizing its social or economic underpinnings. The photograph of a strike, riot or battle pictures the event as an unusual incident within a situation amenable to resolution, rather than as the inevitable consequence of profound and basic conflicts of interest. The visual shorthand of the photograph can hardly do more.

Stripped from its temporal continuum and its context, the photograph becomes a kind of illustration which takes its meaning from the other bits on the page, in the issue, or in the broadcast.

. . . the primary task in story selection . . . is, as one top editor put it, " . . . to tell readers this is what we think is important, and we hope they'll feel the same way, but our aim isn't ideological."¹²

In American mainstream media, "ideology" is generally treated as a significant and negative aspect of Communist governments or the extreme left or right fringes of our own political spectrum. Most American political groups, and certainly business and government, are not considered to be ideological. Nor, of course, is most of the news industry. But structuring information is ideological activity; it creates the "complex of propositions about the natural and social world which would generally be accepted as describing the actual, indeed necessary, nature of the world and its events . . . the sum of taken-for-granted realities of everyday life."¹³ The "free and uncensored" news media constitute an especially effective channel for ideological expression; their power is exercised through a set of tacitly shared assumptions rather than obviously directed intentions. These assumptions are shared by the audience as well, but they are based on selectively incomplete data, and on the reiteration of cultural norms which have become so familiar we can hardly imagine any others -- and which we believe are the product of free choice. The role of the photograph in creating these shared assumptions is central: it documents what we believe are significant events in a manner we accept as accurate; it eliminates whatever we are to consider insignificant or irrelevant.

The editorial use of the photograph focuses narrowly on particular events; it also penetrates deeply into areas once considered private or personal. No moment of grief, pain, loss, or suffering seems immune to the scrutiny of the photograph. The presence of the photojournalist forces private experiences into the realm of the universal and provides a paradigm for how we experience events. And the photographic gaze, the presence of the witness, alters and shapes the course of the event. The photojournalist is part of the battle, matching the combatants shot-for-shot, and sometimes taking the same risks as the soldiers. Whether the effect on an event is desirable seems not to be an issue for the news industry; it is one of the problems of getting the news, apparently not much more significant than f-stops or film stock. Clearly the government recognizes the implications of a photographic witness, and when it would rather not have one it excludes the press, as it did during the Grenada adventure.

For the photojournalist who attempts any more analytic or substantive exposure of events, the format of the newspaper, magazine, or nightly news broadcast can be especially frustrating. The unambiguous and easily accessible shot which "tells the story" is necessary, even if the circumstances described do not lend themselves to simple stylization. Alternatives such as the book or gallery present photographic data in greater depth, but it no longer functions as quite the same kind of information: the audience for photographs in an art context has different expectations and experiences than the audience for the same photograph presented as news. Ultimately the journalist's photograph is an item of more-or-less raw material which will be framed, cropped, scaled and contextualized to fit the definition and perform the function assigned to it as part of the ideological dialogue we know as news.

It is all the news? It is only the news we need? Or is it only All The News That's Fit to Print?

Notes

¹ 1. " . . . pointing it one way means you are turning it away from something else." Linda Ellerbee, as quoted in the Columbia Journalism Review (March-April 1984), p. 48.

² Roberto Sosa, "Freehand Sketch," VOLCAN (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1983), p. 88.

³ Cal Olson, ed. The Best of Photojournalism/8 (Philadelphia: Running Press, 1983), p. 1.

⁴ Ibid, p. 248.

⁵ Ibid, p. 64.

⁶ Mark Godfrey, "On Photojournalism," Tri-Quarterly Review (Winter, 1984), p. 93.

⁷ Olson, The Best of Photojournalism, p. 62.

⁸ Ibid, p. 28.

⁹ Jonathan Green, American Photography: A Critical History 1945 to the Present (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1984), p. 120.

¹⁰ Ibid, p. 120.

¹¹ H. Eugene Goodwin, Groping for Ethics in Journalism (Iowa State University Press, 1984).

¹² Herbert J. Gans, Deciding What's News (New York: Vintage Press, 1980), p. 182.

¹³ Victor Burgin, Photographic Practice and Art Theory, Thinking Photography (London: The MacMillan Press, Ltd., 1982), p. 46.