Photo Journalism

What is photojournalism?

-Photojournalism can be envisioned as many different things, that including combined photos that tell a story, a collage of historic photos and photos that are in actual reality. As Professor Nordell said, “Divide the words into two words, photo and journalism. Its photos made to be put into journals.” And with that being the overall subject that leaves the photographers with the job title of a photojournalist. According to journalism Degree, The primary role of the photojournalist is to be a visual storyteller. By photographing, editing, and presenting images, they tell a story in a way that no other media can. The photographs serve the purpose of enhancing the story for the reader or viewer.

The importance of photojournalism?

The importance of photojournalism is to make the viewers feel as though they are there with the photojournalist. Here the importance displays the actual severity of the situation realizing that the photographer is capturing the moments as they are occurring. To read something and to actually see something creates two complete different emotions. As said in Steve’s Digicams, “a single photo can speak louder than several words can. It has the ability to enhance a news story, making it more understandable to the viewer or reader.”

Image Source: http://nicpicz.blogspot.com/2011/04/documentary-photos.html

Image Source: http://www.anunlikelyweapon.com/eddie.html

Photo by: Eddie Adams

Looking at the videos that were posted in the module content material it gave me a good idea of the severity that photojournalists have to deal with in order to get that proper image that tells the story. As said in the video in harm’s way, “Every photographers dream is to capture the image that will stop a war.” With that quote alone you can sense that he meant by any means, photographers wanted to capture that compelling image that would ultimately tell the untold stories of conflict.

Also as James Nachtwey said, “if everyone could be there at least one time to see and experience what goes on to see what its like they would understand that nothing is worth getting to the point where that happens to one person let alone thousands. But everyone cannot that’s why photographers go there to show them and reach out to them and make them stop what their doing to create pictures powerful enough to shake people out of their differences.” Photographers have a very dangerous job ahead of them but to be able to show viewers the reality of conflict situations drive them to pursue the perfect pictures.