Daily Archives: September 6, 2015

Filters

Author:
Category:
Help and Support, Mr T instruction

Standards and Ethics in documentary

Leave a comment

Contextual Study: Your first task is to describe the genre of documentary photography. In class last Friday we discussed a few issues around aesthetic, moral and ethical considerations when you are  depicting truth, recording life as it as and using your camera as a witness. We used current news images as case studies, such as the drowned Syrian boy (read article here) and to continue the debate I would like you to read the following articles when you are considering writing your response to the task on documentary photography.

05VISA-master675
Visitors at the Visa Pour l’Image festival in Perpignan, France, where a searching debate about the ethics of photojournalism is unfolding.

Currently, the International Festival of Photojournalism, Visa Pour L’Image is in Perpignan (South France) where a debate about ‘Standards and Ethics’ in photojournalism is raging. Here is an article published in New York Times yesterday which features different views on how much manipulation is acceptable in making images when you consider yourself a photojournalist. The debate is between staged photography and photojournalism claim to only bear witness.

Task 1: Read the article carefully, especially the views expressed by festival director, Jean-François Leroy, Lars Boering, Managing Director of World Press Photo and Canadian documentary photographer, Donald Webber who served as the chairman judging the Documentary section at the contest earlier in 2015. Consider the questions below and write a paragraph or two where you try and include direct quotes from the article and comment in your own words as a response. For further context, make sure you follow hyperlinks in the article to take you to other sites and comments.

Q1: Who sets the boundaries of what defines photojournalism?
Q2: When technology makes it so easy to manipulate images, how much manipulation is acceptable?
Q3: With viewers more sophisticated and skeptical than ever before, how can photojournalists preserve their integrity and maintain trust?

Link to NPPA (National Press Photographer’s Association) Code of Ethics. Compare views expressed in the article above with these.

Link to article about the photographer who took the photos of the dead Syrian boy where she speaks about why she took them.

Link to Visa Pour L’Image Festival website

Link to World Press Photo

Link to video where Donald Webber discusses judging images in last year’s World Press Photo contest

Link to article about controversial images made by Giovanni Trioli at this years World Press Photo context

Link to Giovanni Trioli’s website

05WORLDPRESS-master675
A photograph that was part of a winning package at the World Press Photo awards. The image, of an intimate scene in Charleroi, Belgium, came under scrutiny over whether it broke contest rules. Credit Giovanni Troil
LaVilleNoire_web_014-1000x775 (1)
From La Ville Noire by Giovanni Troil

Last week we also discussed if photographs can change the world. Again we looked at a few examples, notably Nick Ut’s famous image from the Vietnam War.

Nick-Ut-Children-Fleeing-an-Aerican-Napalm-Strike-1972
Vietnam Napalm 1972 South Vietnamese forces follow after terrified children, including 9-year-old Kim Phuc, center, as they run down Route 1 near Trang Bang after an aerial napalm attack on suspected Viet Cong

Task 2: Consider if photographs can change the world or change people’s perception? Here is a a blog post by photographer and lecturer, Lewis Bush where he discuss the above in light of recent images of dead Syrian refugees in Europe. Include quotes in your answer.

Click here http://www.disphotic.com/photographs-wont-change-the-world/

photographs-wont-change-the-world

 

Research

Street Photography

Leave a comment

Street photography is simply photography featuring the human condition within public places. I think this kind of documentary photography is very raw and something that a lot of people enjoy doing nowadays. This is the movement in which the photographer isn’t trying to send out a message about one form of society that needs to be changed but is simply documenting the world around them, showing the rest of the world what their own personal world looks like. I think street photography is the documentation of the people. We often forget about ourselves as communities when looking at the news seeing famine and crisis in other parts of the world as well as being hypnotised by the celebrity world. Our regular lifestyles are going to be the ones that the people of generations to come are going to focus on and look into.
Street photography is all about the timing and capturing people and places in its greatest form. It is less news and more everyday average life. These photographers tend to capture elements of peoples days that we would often overlook or not even think about. I like this style of photography as it shows that normal people are just as interesting as those of the celebrity world and that sometimes they can be even more interesting than those who are constantly in the tabloids and always camera ready. Here photographers are able to capture the most raw images of real people, some not even noticing the camera as they go about their lives. They can capture a person unexpectedly, like when we wonder we come across new people often unexpectedly. I think that street photographers simply photograph the usual elements of life that we see everyday and ignore. Here many amazing images can be produced.

I like to take photos of public spaces and put them on my social media sights. I do this as a way of remembering how my world was at this point in my life. I like to capture different people in my shots and to reflect on them and see what kind of people I’ve captured in my images, business people, parents, teenagers, tourists, children etc. Here are some of my own images that I have taken for my social media.

Planning

Documentry Photography: Initial Response

Leave a comment

Documentary is the recording of observations through film, media, writing and other artistic means. It has been used throughout centuries for many different purposes, ranging from caveman making artistic sketches on cave walls, to the documentation of the most important and significant political events of the 20th and 21st Centuries.

Documentary Photography is the process of making such observations using still image. The photographer (or photojournalist’s) intention is the create a narrative of their experiences and observations. Documentary photography in my opinion is all about conveying a story, whether that be through a series of images that structure a narrative, or through a single image that captivates a powerful message. On the other hand though, it could be argued that all photography is technically documentary, because the act of capturing light is in itself an document of reality.

Images like this, capturing the first contact between two individuals of the same fractured nation, separated by 40 years of cold war, symbolizes the immense power that photography has as a means to document humanity at it’s most powerful extremes. The accidental blur of this image captures the moment in it’s most spontaneous essence, a moment in time with a sense of movement which symbolizes and expresses Germany’s desire to move forward.

 

Robert Frank’s, ‘The Americans’ is seen as arguably the most influential body of documentary photography

Robert-Capa-07

Robert Capa’s iconic photographs of WWII are seen as a benchmark for modern War photographers.

The role of a documentary photography is to express through the image, a particular moment  visualizing the message which the photographer is attempting to convey. Their images reflect their view of the world and society, either subjectively or objectively. The war photographer Robert Capa for example, would deliberately photograph harrowing, grotesque images of pain and death in order to shock the audience and express his ant-war stance. In contrast, Swizz photographer Robert Frank, greatly renowned for his candid photo-book series, ‘The Americans’, photographs far more objectively, basing his work on chance and from a fresh, outsider perspective. Photographs which do not explicitly state any particular mood, idea or emotion.

This image, taken by photojournalist Nilufer Demir earlier this week of the tragic discovery of a dead Syrian boy on a beach in Turkey. This extremely harrowing image emphasizes the important question that many Documentary photographer face concerning ethics and morality. Morally, is it acceptable to photograph a dead child? The fact the this photographer will now profit greatly from this devastating and tragic circumstance is a very controversial issue which has angered very many people. On the other hand, do photographers in fact have a moral duty to document such events, as a way of communicating truth to the rest of the world?