Photojournalism

Photojournalism is a form of journalism that uses photography to tell the story of a particular event. The concept differs from other types of photography and is as old as the mid-1800s.

This branch of journalism emerged sometime in the 1850sn when news articles had an image presented alongside the many lines of text. Though the technology back then only permitted a form of engravings instead of the usual pictures or photographs people have become accustomed to in the last decades, the foundations of photojournalism were set in that period.

The very first photojournalist was Romanian photographer and painter Carol Szathmari, who documented events from the Crimean war. William Simpson, Roger Fenton and Mathew Brady followed with stills taken for publications such as Illustrated News London and Harper’s Weekly. After the invention of flash powder in 1887, photojournalism was enriched with new names.

With the continued evolution of technology and new inventions brought by the passing time, the 1930s came as the beginning of what is now known as the ‘Golden Age’ of photojournalism. Lasting until the 1950s, this Golden Age produced some of the most memorable works by artists Robert Capa, W. Eugene Smith or Margaret Bourke-White. England’s ‘Picture Post’ and ‘The Daily Mirror’, France’s ‘Paris Match’ and Germany’s ‘Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung’ gained more and more readers by using photographs alongside theirs news. And in the United States, ‘The New York Daily’ News and magazines such as ‘Life’, ‘Look’ and ‘Sports Illustrated’ gained success due to photography.

The distinguishing elements that make photojournalism unique among other branches of photography are timelessness, objectivity and narrative. To explain this best, it means that photographers capture images relating to the news articles they are been presented with. This is done in completely uninvolved way as to present the absolute truth without submitting the scene, action of person photographed to a subjective view.

From the point of view of a photojournalist that explains what exactly it is that he or she does, one will describe this type of journalism as telling a story using one image. As other photographs focus on the subject – that is usually a noun like a person, an animal, a building, landscape etc. – photojournalism focuses on the verb. It captures the action taking place around the noun, or that is caused by the noun. Photojournalists are usually present in dangerous conditions or places, regardless of weather or other factors. They’re passion is to hunt for verbs in the space they occupy and to capture them inside one shot that will represent that picture worth a thousand words.

After the 70s photojournalism was seen as much of an art as documentary photography and many artists present their work to the world in galleries that attract a large crowd of people interested in this form of artistic expression.