How I Learned Not to Be a Photojournalist

Diana Hagaman's "How I Learned not to be a Photojournalist" (1996)  influenced my thinking about how modern journalism influences public thought.  Photojournalists were considered second class citizens in the newsroom. Reporters would call one "my photographer." In the 1970s photojournalist began asserting their independence and sought to bring a purity an authenticity to their profession. However, Hagaman points out the following: 

Even though this was a “new” way of doing newspaper photography, it was as conventionalized as what it replaced. It was meant (as was the older system) to solve the working problems of the newspaper photographer...

 I learned, like every competent newspaper photojournalist, to solve the problem by choosing from a repertoire of standard types of pictures that used a limited number of visual components and compositional devices. Making any particular picture was only a matter of adapting the standard format to the specifics of that situation and trying to get an original twist on the standard image.

Standard ways of composing a photograph (organizing its graphic elements in the frame) enhanced its impact. I learned to use a telephoto lens to isolate the subject by making the background out of focus. (The term we used was to make the subject “pop.”) I learned to use a wide-angle lens to place the subject in extreme foreground, so that it appeared much larger than elements in the background. These techniques contributed to making photographs whose message was readily apparent. Standard images illustrated the equally standardized stories I was called on to photograph. When an editor asks for a sports photograph that “says losing,” experienced photographers know what kinds of gestures and compositions “say” losing and where these combinations are likely to occur at a sporting event. The categories of winning and losing and the analysis (that this is the most significant theme) have already been determined. The language, the form, the ideas are already set and are applied to all situations.

So are photojournalists recording an event or they creating a contrivance to illicit an emotion the newsroom wants to deliver? 

Photo: Photo of TV film crew on location in North St. Paul, Minnesota eye care center taken for a weekly newspaper in 1988. Photograph by Mike Woolsey.