Ask someone to list three art forms and the answer will invariably include at least two of the following: Painting, Dance and Music. Of course, world cinema may scrape in alongside sculpture and literature. But the likes of Hollywood blockbusters, graphic art and graffiti are left by the wayside, as is photography.
When photojournalism emerged in the late 1920s it was broadly defined as a spontaneous and topical photographic narrative of human events. Over the decades the narrative flowed, almost to a standstill as motion picture grabbed the baton and sprinted to the finish line. Then, in the 1950s, photographers looked to the fine arts for inspiration and found it in composition, lighting, and of course emotion. These so-called value adds were leapt upon by newspaper editors, and the photojournalism as you know it today, was born
The 50s and 60s was also the golden age of Indian photojournalism. The greats like the TS Satyan, N Thyagarajan, Kishore Parek, S Paul and Raghu Rai, to name a few, brought images that melded informative content with emotional impact, even as they stuck to the journalistic values their artists embodied. These ethics held pride of place over aesthetics.
These great photojournalists put the use of perspective into practice. They gave their photographs a makeover using lighting, new angles, off-center frames, and had their subjects look away from the camera, rather than staring into it like they would in a rogues’ gallery. These greats also raised the bar for all the photojournalists that were to follow.
Photography and its informed criticism is still a nascent discipline. Technological advancements have meant that the study of photography has become a lifelong venture, rather than one that can be mastered in just a few years.
Museums and art galleries in this country have yet to recognize, and give prominence to the works of Indian photography and photojournalism masters. Unfortunately, in India we only tend to recognise the rich talent our country had, has, and will have, only after critics from the West have discovered them.
Like the father of modern photojournalism Henri Cartier-Bresson once said, “Actually, I'm not all that interested in the subject of photography. Once the picture is in the box, I'm not all that interested in what happens next. Hunters, after all, aren't cooks.”
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
In a digital world, the oyster is no longer a delicacy
A visual journalist will be far more knowledgeable about photography as an art form, than any of his predecessors
It’s a strange feeling when you bump into long-lost friends while on assignment and they ask you what you do for a living. My stock reply is that I’m a photographer working at a newspaper. The word ‘photographer’ in itself has morphed over the past decade into the ever-so-slightly presumptuous ‘photojournalist’. Now, as we approach the end of the first decade of the third millennium, the latter term is changing.
The tweens will be dominated by the ‘visual journalist’ or the ‘visual reporter’, and these sound a tad more apt with imagery taking the Indian newspaper industry in its stranglehold.
A visual journalist will be far more knowledgeable about photography as an art form, than any of his predecessors. He will be equipped with tools that will enable to carry out his duties with speed, accuracy a digital élan; he will move beyond the static and into a dynamic world where images break into molecules, each telling a story.
Digital technology has levelled the professional photography playing field. Photographers are no longer bound by newsroom hierarchies. The internet and sites like Flickr and Facebook means that they can get their pictures to the public without battling a interpersonal minefield.
The future photography department will have professionals in specific areas in the field, like sports, conceptual, entertainment, and portraiture, to name a few. While the numbers of photographers increase exponentially with advancements in technology, the rush to fill slots in newspapers will become a crush. And for photo editors, the so-called gatekeepers of a newspaper’s visual element, the job will take on an intensity heretofore only bragged about.
As with any field, a quantitative rise does not necessarily translate into a qualitative one. Photo editors will have to sift through the imagery looking out for those diamonds in the rough, and believe me the rough will be overwhelming, but the gems will shine so much brighter for it.
Journalism, however, will remain at the roots of photography, but the imagery will be broken down into pixels. The primary colours will serve to highlight the graphic lure of each composition, just as writers use each letter to manifest a phrase that conjures thought.
The visual journalist of the future will also be equipped with additional knowledge of the computerised pagination processes, web design, and digital workflow systems thus ensuring that the newsy, stylistic and aesthetic perspective will have never looked better.
It’s a strange feeling when you bump into long-lost friends while on assignment and they ask you what you do for a living. My stock reply is that I’m a photographer working at a newspaper. The word ‘photographer’ in itself has morphed over the past decade into the ever-so-slightly presumptuous ‘photojournalist’. Now, as we approach the end of the first decade of the third millennium, the latter term is changing.
The tweens will be dominated by the ‘visual journalist’ or the ‘visual reporter’, and these sound a tad more apt with imagery taking the Indian newspaper industry in its stranglehold.
A visual journalist will be far more knowledgeable about photography as an art form, than any of his predecessors. He will be equipped with tools that will enable to carry out his duties with speed, accuracy a digital élan; he will move beyond the static and into a dynamic world where images break into molecules, each telling a story.
Digital technology has levelled the professional photography playing field. Photographers are no longer bound by newsroom hierarchies. The internet and sites like Flickr and Facebook means that they can get their pictures to the public without battling a interpersonal minefield.
The future photography department will have professionals in specific areas in the field, like sports, conceptual, entertainment, and portraiture, to name a few. While the numbers of photographers increase exponentially with advancements in technology, the rush to fill slots in newspapers will become a crush. And for photo editors, the so-called gatekeepers of a newspaper’s visual element, the job will take on an intensity heretofore only bragged about.
As with any field, a quantitative rise does not necessarily translate into a qualitative one. Photo editors will have to sift through the imagery looking out for those diamonds in the rough, and believe me the rough will be overwhelming, but the gems will shine so much brighter for it.
Journalism, however, will remain at the roots of photography, but the imagery will be broken down into pixels. The primary colours will serve to highlight the graphic lure of each composition, just as writers use each letter to manifest a phrase that conjures thought.
The visual journalist of the future will also be equipped with additional knowledge of the computerised pagination processes, web design, and digital workflow systems thus ensuring that the newsy, stylistic and aesthetic perspective will have never looked better.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Bright are images of the future
When I joined DNA in August of 2008, the launch was still four months away. I knew little of the organisation that had just sprinted into the leading pack of the country’s newspapers with fervour in just a short period of four years.
But as the launch approached I knew that the editor would ask the photo department to pitch in by putting out a picture page to keep cheques balanced till the advertisements started to flow into the newspaper. Then, or so I presumed, the ‘much-vaunted’ picture page would shut shop with a sign on the front door, saying, ‘no space’.
The design process was set in place, and the name ‘Pic Me Up’ suggested by a former senior editor. And the rest, as they say, is history. Visual themes, photo essays, and news in pictures, would run six days a week. The sign stayed firmly in the box.
Of course the page has had its fair share of hiccoughs, as is to be expected when you are trying to up the ante in terms of quality on a daily basis. But for Indian journalism a daily photo feature page was pathbreaking, and the readers stood up in their support of the initiative.
In September, 2009, Pic Me Up launched the i-Pic, a daily space where readers could send in their photographs, and win a prize. I take this opportunity to thank them for the great response we received, right up until the competition closed on November 15. We received more than 1,000 entries.
But if you were to ask me what Pic Me Up epitomises…it’s the spirit of the team. This page would have been impossible without the tireless efforts of DNA’s photographers, and it is a testament to their resilience and their talents.
As I sign off, I humble request the picture-loving readers of DNA’s Pic Me Up to keep watching this space as we enter another year. This page is yours, and the future is going to be brighter than ever.
But as the launch approached I knew that the editor would ask the photo department to pitch in by putting out a picture page to keep cheques balanced till the advertisements started to flow into the newspaper. Then, or so I presumed, the ‘much-vaunted’ picture page would shut shop with a sign on the front door, saying, ‘no space’.
The design process was set in place, and the name ‘Pic Me Up’ suggested by a former senior editor. And the rest, as they say, is history. Visual themes, photo essays, and news in pictures, would run six days a week. The sign stayed firmly in the box.
Of course the page has had its fair share of hiccoughs, as is to be expected when you are trying to up the ante in terms of quality on a daily basis. But for Indian journalism a daily photo feature page was pathbreaking, and the readers stood up in their support of the initiative.
In September, 2009, Pic Me Up launched the i-Pic, a daily space where readers could send in their photographs, and win a prize. I take this opportunity to thank them for the great response we received, right up until the competition closed on November 15. We received more than 1,000 entries.
But if you were to ask me what Pic Me Up epitomises…it’s the spirit of the team. This page would have been impossible without the tireless efforts of DNA’s photographers, and it is a testament to their resilience and their talents.
As I sign off, I humble request the picture-loving readers of DNA’s Pic Me Up to keep watching this space as we enter another year. This page is yours, and the future is going to be brighter than ever.
Citizen photojournalism is the future of new media
The print media as seen a sea change over the past two decades from the typical newsroom sound of tapping tickers and typewriters, to the present day buzz of CPUs all humming to a technological conductor.
‘New Photojournalism’ has also seen an impressive change from the good old days of time-consuming film-based, dark-room processed and printed SLR camera photography to the present day digital time-saving D-SLR photography. This shift in technology has added more responsibilities to present day photojournalists, forcing them to give an increasing number of concept-based pictures to suit a report and ensure it has a clear edge over rivals in the newspaper market.
With fixed lens digital cameras and mobile phone cameras flooding the market in large quantities the age of the citizen photojournalist has truly arrived, and it’s here to stay, eventually replacing the professional news photographer.
Amateur photographers have been highly-prized for decades. Take for instance Abraham Zapruder’s motion pictures of the assassination of John F Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963, which fetched him $150,000 in those days. Then you have the citizen photojournalism images taken of the London tube bombings where a citizen pulled his mobile camera to film people escaping from smoke-filled bogeys soon after a blast rocked London’s mass transport system.
In yet another incident a 17-year-old was paid a whopping $40,000 for a grainy image taken on his mobile, which was the first photograph taken of one of the cars used in the London bombings. It showed a Green Mercedes parked outside the Tiger nightclub in Haymarket, and next to it, one of the gas canisters that the car contained.
And now Reuters and Yahoo! have jumped on the citizen photojournalism bandwagon with gusto; in the hope of turning millions of people with digital cameras and camera phones into citizen photojournalists. These image will be distributed, through a special package, to hundreds of print, online and broadcast media subscribers across the world.
The professionals who deal in breaking news have a big problem on their hands in the future, one with which they can’t possibly compete. When the tools of creation and access are so profoundly democratised, the best professionals fight a losing battle to save their careers.
Like Kyle McRae the founder of Scoopt, one of the first citizen photojournalism online stock libraries (who later sold its collection to Getty images) had said: "Because the potential, or the reality, is that the first person on the scene is going to be you or me or somebody like us. It's not going to be a professional photographer or a news journalist. So it's not enough for you and me to dedicate the rest of our lives to chasing down news stories. We do need the power of the crowd."
‘New Photojournalism’ has also seen an impressive change from the good old days of time-consuming film-based, dark-room processed and printed SLR camera photography to the present day digital time-saving D-SLR photography. This shift in technology has added more responsibilities to present day photojournalists, forcing them to give an increasing number of concept-based pictures to suit a report and ensure it has a clear edge over rivals in the newspaper market.
With fixed lens digital cameras and mobile phone cameras flooding the market in large quantities the age of the citizen photojournalist has truly arrived, and it’s here to stay, eventually replacing the professional news photographer.
Amateur photographers have been highly-prized for decades. Take for instance Abraham Zapruder’s motion pictures of the assassination of John F Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963, which fetched him $150,000 in those days. Then you have the citizen photojournalism images taken of the London tube bombings where a citizen pulled his mobile camera to film people escaping from smoke-filled bogeys soon after a blast rocked London’s mass transport system.
In yet another incident a 17-year-old was paid a whopping $40,000 for a grainy image taken on his mobile, which was the first photograph taken of one of the cars used in the London bombings. It showed a Green Mercedes parked outside the Tiger nightclub in Haymarket, and next to it, one of the gas canisters that the car contained.
And now Reuters and Yahoo! have jumped on the citizen photojournalism bandwagon with gusto; in the hope of turning millions of people with digital cameras and camera phones into citizen photojournalists. These image will be distributed, through a special package, to hundreds of print, online and broadcast media subscribers across the world.
The professionals who deal in breaking news have a big problem on their hands in the future, one with which they can’t possibly compete. When the tools of creation and access are so profoundly democratised, the best professionals fight a losing battle to save their careers.
Like Kyle McRae the founder of Scoopt, one of the first citizen photojournalism online stock libraries (who later sold its collection to Getty images) had said: "Because the potential, or the reality, is that the first person on the scene is going to be you or me or somebody like us. It's not going to be a professional photographer or a news journalist. So it's not enough for you and me to dedicate the rest of our lives to chasing down news stories. We do need the power of the crowd."
In the race against time, a question of ethics
Modern newspapers work to a clock that deals in seconds and minutes, rather than days or weeks, and so must photographers
In the previous week’s column we discussed how the digitalisation of photography has changed the face of photojournalism and how this has, at times, had the photographer at an ethical crossroads.
Modern newspapers work to a clock that deals in seconds and minutes, rather than days or weeks, and so must photographers. Gone are the days when a photographer could spend a few days searching for that perfect picture, not as rails against time, he sometimes has to rely on sheer talent and luck to get a printable photograph. These time constraints can sometimes force him to chose an unethical path, doctoring or embellishing an image to suit the editorial.
There has been a trend of late in the print media where photographers are increasingly asked to concentrate on the aesthetics of composition, rather than content. Their roles have become akin to creative visualisers rather than documenters of news. Celebrities, lifestyle and other ‘soft’ topics have become the rule, and social photography the exception.
Take the case of the photojournalist who was asked to cover a fashion show in the morning, and then a portrait of losing mayoral candidate just one hour later. The photojournalist needs time to move from one frame of mind from where lighting plays a major role while snapping pictures of models sashaying down a ramp to another, where a man is at one of life’s many cusps. If he’s not careful, he could end up with a sashaying politician.
Many say the camera cannot lie, and that is true only in the sense that the images it captures must have existed in one form or another in time. But it is not always clear if those images have been manipulated to alter, or to stage an event that never actually happened. Staging a photograph only adds insult to the already injured ethics of photojournalism, and it is all the more injurious when one knows that ‘staging’ has been done by some of the finest photographers in the world.
Though photographers in the West have suffered its fair share of lapses on the ethical front, in India, it has become an epidemic. In one of the most macabre incidents, three of the country’s top photographers dug up a four-day-old grave of a small boy to highlight the catastrophe of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. That the boy was in no way connected to the event seemed to not have bothered them in the least.
Digitally manipulating a photograph is as bad as staging one. Digital manipulation is relatively easy to accomplish, hard to detect, and perhaps more alarming, is that the alteration takes place in the original image, hence checking authenticity is virtually impossible. This is why courts these days tend not to use photographs as evidence, and why they probably won’t do so in the future either.
Photographers will use numerous arguments to defend themselves. They’ll say reporters cook up quotes, sub-editors use blatantly misleading headlines, and feature writers plagiarise, but there’s really no excuse…for any of the above. The reader is your god, and if you fail him, then there truly will be hell to pay.
In the previous week’s column we discussed how the digitalisation of photography has changed the face of photojournalism and how this has, at times, had the photographer at an ethical crossroads.
Modern newspapers work to a clock that deals in seconds and minutes, rather than days or weeks, and so must photographers. Gone are the days when a photographer could spend a few days searching for that perfect picture, not as rails against time, he sometimes has to rely on sheer talent and luck to get a printable photograph. These time constraints can sometimes force him to chose an unethical path, doctoring or embellishing an image to suit the editorial.
There has been a trend of late in the print media where photographers are increasingly asked to concentrate on the aesthetics of composition, rather than content. Their roles have become akin to creative visualisers rather than documenters of news. Celebrities, lifestyle and other ‘soft’ topics have become the rule, and social photography the exception.
Take the case of the photojournalist who was asked to cover a fashion show in the morning, and then a portrait of losing mayoral candidate just one hour later. The photojournalist needs time to move from one frame of mind from where lighting plays a major role while snapping pictures of models sashaying down a ramp to another, where a man is at one of life’s many cusps. If he’s not careful, he could end up with a sashaying politician.
Many say the camera cannot lie, and that is true only in the sense that the images it captures must have existed in one form or another in time. But it is not always clear if those images have been manipulated to alter, or to stage an event that never actually happened. Staging a photograph only adds insult to the already injured ethics of photojournalism, and it is all the more injurious when one knows that ‘staging’ has been done by some of the finest photographers in the world.
Though photographers in the West have suffered its fair share of lapses on the ethical front, in India, it has become an epidemic. In one of the most macabre incidents, three of the country’s top photographers dug up a four-day-old grave of a small boy to highlight the catastrophe of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. That the boy was in no way connected to the event seemed to not have bothered them in the least.
Digitally manipulating a photograph is as bad as staging one. Digital manipulation is relatively easy to accomplish, hard to detect, and perhaps more alarming, is that the alteration takes place in the original image, hence checking authenticity is virtually impossible. This is why courts these days tend not to use photographs as evidence, and why they probably won’t do so in the future either.
Photographers will use numerous arguments to defend themselves. They’ll say reporters cook up quotes, sub-editors use blatantly misleading headlines, and feature writers plagiarise, but there’s really no excuse…for any of the above. The reader is your god, and if you fail him, then there truly will be hell to pay.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
The noughties and the age of photographic digitisation
Visual messages have the power to persuade, educate and entertain and thus put a great responsibility on the photographer
It may have been 1993, when American photojournalists got their hands on the Digital Lens Reflex (D-SLR) camera in large numbers, but it was way back in 1973 that the technology was created by Kodak in Rochester, New York.
Kodak’s body was big and scary enough to put any professional ill at ease. This, however, was the R&D model and nowhere near what it would look like when it entered mass production.
The first commercial digital SLR (Kodak DCS-100) was launched in 1991, it had a modified Nikon F3 SLR body, a modified drive unit with an external storage unit connected via a cable, and a 1.3 megapixel that cost a whopping $30,000.
Through the decade (1990 to 1999) numerous players jumped into the digital photography market: Canon, Nikon, Kodak, Pentax, Fuji to name a few. But in 1999, it was Nikon that took the lead with the launch of the Nikon D1, which marked the beginning of the end of the film camera era (I was very lucky to have used the D1 in its launch year during my stint with a newspaper in North India, though it was only meant for very important assignments).
In India, forward-thinking newspapers — which up until than had been using negative scanners or print scanners for pictures to be digitally transferred on to their Quark pages — grabbed at this opportunity by ensuring that their respective photo departments went digital. But it was only in mid-2002, when Nikon launched the D-100, that the death rattle of film, turned into rigor mortis.
Newspapers that hadn’t cottoned onto the virtues of digital photography now swiftly converted to D-SLR in the hope that by cutting down on film purchase and printing they would in turn cut overall costs. It worked, and the shift would become a pivotal moment in the publishing industry.
But with the invasion of technology into the artistic field came with it a crisis of ethics and photography took a hammering. Images started appearing having been digitally manipulated to catch the viewer’s eye.
Visual messages have the power to persuade, educate and entertain and thus put a great responsibility on the photographer. Take for instance some of the recent images taken after the advent of D-SLR and Adobe’s Photoshop; an increasing number of manipulated pictures have started to find space on magazine covers, in newspapers and on wire services.
But ethics in photography is a whole other column
It may have been 1993, when American photojournalists got their hands on the Digital Lens Reflex (D-SLR) camera in large numbers, but it was way back in 1973 that the technology was created by Kodak in Rochester, New York.
Kodak’s body was big and scary enough to put any professional ill at ease. This, however, was the R&D model and nowhere near what it would look like when it entered mass production.
The first commercial digital SLR (Kodak DCS-100) was launched in 1991, it had a modified Nikon F3 SLR body, a modified drive unit with an external storage unit connected via a cable, and a 1.3 megapixel that cost a whopping $30,000.
Through the decade (1990 to 1999) numerous players jumped into the digital photography market: Canon, Nikon, Kodak, Pentax, Fuji to name a few. But in 1999, it was Nikon that took the lead with the launch of the Nikon D1, which marked the beginning of the end of the film camera era (I was very lucky to have used the D1 in its launch year during my stint with a newspaper in North India, though it was only meant for very important assignments).
In India, forward-thinking newspapers — which up until than had been using negative scanners or print scanners for pictures to be digitally transferred on to their Quark pages — grabbed at this opportunity by ensuring that their respective photo departments went digital. But it was only in mid-2002, when Nikon launched the D-100, that the death rattle of film, turned into rigor mortis.
Newspapers that hadn’t cottoned onto the virtues of digital photography now swiftly converted to D-SLR in the hope that by cutting down on film purchase and printing they would in turn cut overall costs. It worked, and the shift would become a pivotal moment in the publishing industry.
But with the invasion of technology into the artistic field came with it a crisis of ethics and photography took a hammering. Images started appearing having been digitally manipulated to catch the viewer’s eye.
Visual messages have the power to persuade, educate and entertain and thus put a great responsibility on the photographer. Take for instance some of the recent images taken after the advent of D-SLR and Adobe’s Photoshop; an increasing number of manipulated pictures have started to find space on magazine covers, in newspapers and on wire services.
But ethics in photography is a whole other column
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