Same World, New Lens

February 2, 2007

by Erin Baldassari

The evolving world of digital media has a tremendous impact on the growth of communications and news in the United States. The omnipresence of television and print journalism provides a unique opportunity for photographers to define how the world is presented to the public, but also lays much responsibility on photographers to get it right. Last Tuesday, renowned photojournalist Eugene Richards visited Tufts to present a brief retrospective of his work. His visit provided unique perspectives on photojournalism.

The increasing role of photojournalism has raised important questions about the evolution of a photographer’s role in taking a shot. Photojournalists are both artists and reporters. Should they hold preconceived notions of what they want in the frame, or should they take pictures with little concern for aesthetics? Is photojournalism art or news? Rather than letting the subject dictate the mood or feel to the photograph, there is a prior assessment made by the artist. Contemporary photography is emotional, charged to evoke sympathy or fear or hate, to persuade the viewer with compelling actual evidence. Richards touched on this in our conversation.

“There is a trend now to make pictures more metaphorical and less direct,” he said. “That haunting image of a starving mother in Africa is now a symbol of starvation. It’s no longer about her: that mother, her child- starving, and a portrait of her staring you in the face. There is less direct confrontation in photojournalism today.”

He continued: “Some places we go, like the third world countries, are often very beautiful. If you take away the destruction they cause, bombs are beautiful, aesthetically. As a photojournalist, you don’t let that interfere with the point of the photo. But on the other hand, if it’s too ugly, people won’t look at it.”

For Richards, presentation is the point of photography. The nature of war is ugly, destructive, horrifying. The goal, he says, is to take pictures that people can identify with. “Recognition,” he says, “is to show and make people feel it could be you in that frame. The idea is to relate to the subject of the photo. It’s not the war in Iraq, it’s our war in Iraq.”

But Richards realizes that pictures alone cannot tell the whole story. “Photographs can’t tell specifically who a person is. They give us hints. There are very few facts in photos. A photo is a tool for dialogue. It can create conversation and provide information if people will use it. People think you have the definitive answer because it’s a picture. There is no definitive answer; there are always only more questions.”

Richards explained this simple truth in a way I had never conceived it before. Here was Eugene Richards, the one voice I wanted to hear at the conference, telling me that photojournalism doesn’t present fact but rather a catalyst for conversation about what the facts are. A picture is not worth a thousand words; it is worth a thousand conversations.

Or rather, a picture is only worth the story behind it. A photo can elucidate a brief flicker caught in time, but that flicker is only an abstract cover to the reality of a situation. Words give context to the flicker, grounding it into the larger reality of experience. We see a photograph and want to believe its intrinsic truth. Pictures can’t lie, right? But even before the age of Photoshop, photographs have routinely been used as propaganda. There is no angle with a wide enough lens to capture the worldly context of every situation ever captured in a photograph. Somehow, those thousand words are just not enough.

It’s important to remember there is always a person behind the lens who has the ability to leave the situation, and a person in front of the lens who does not. Eugene Richards knows that. He is one of the few photojournalists who really sees his subjects and their reality. He doesn’t romanticize tragedy, and he doesn’t shy away from confrontation. He sees, and then he takes a picture.