Disaster and despair need not define us
Posted: July 1st, 2010 | Author: wade | Filed under: Ethics, Inspiration | Tags: Ethics, Photos 1440, World Press Photo | No Comments »
Today we’re finishing the hanging of prints for a month-long exhibition of the Herald’s best photography from throughout the past year. Called Photos 1440, it’s one of four exhibitions that are part of Canon’s EOS Festival of Photography, and we’re quite thrilled that it’s going to be conducted alongside the Sydney leg of the World Press Photo exhibition world-tour.
With Photos 1440 and the Word Press Photo exhibitions occurring simultaneously in opposite wings of the State Library of New South Wales, the contrast between their respective works is all the more clear and it begs the question: why must World Press Photo be so bloody upsetting all of the time? It’s generally very worthy subject-matter I concede, but surely there’s more of that to be found than is for the most part confined to conflicts and generic misfortune, year after year after year?
Why shouldn’t photojournalism be experienced without having to so commonly take the viewer down a path of misery and despair? It hasn’t always been this way — in fact photojournalism’s formative years were so very much the opposite. If you trace the movements of the early master practitioners in the Golden Age of our craft, it was daily life and street photography that defined their early work over many years during the 1930s. Of course when it arrived, The Second World War was an event delivered to the public in pictures like none before it by the work of those same photographers. But for at least the preceding decade, photojournalism was able to thrive in the pages of the world’s mainstream magazines without war.
If you know World Press Photo then you know it’s always confronting and never spares you the full-frontal realities of the impact on human beings caught in the middle of those events that it chronicles. It’s always been this way — so much so that World Press has become synonymous with war, poverty, disaster and peril and in the eyes of some that formula has now come to define photojournalism itself.
But the craft is so much more than that, and as such Photos 1440 is purposefully different. Its intent is not only to confront but also to extract from its audience a broader range of responses – things like amusement and joyousness. But that’s not for one moment to denigrate World Press Photo as an institution or its contributors and all of their great work — for they quite simply are the cream of our crop. But many of you might nonetheless concede my point that for a competition showcasing the highest achievements in our field, World Press Photo has become terribly insular — its audience is now not the mainstream, rather it’s mostly made up of the photographic and the arts communities, which is ironic for a trade that is driven by getting the story out.
Having said all of that, for the most part Photos 1440 (named that way to mark the total number of minutes in each day) does not itself comprise of photojournalism as such. Rather it’s an exhibition of the work of press photographers whose general intention is creating pictures that draw you in, not make you want to look away. Compared with traditional photojournalism, press photography is the short-form of the same article if you like. The work of the World Press Photo winners is in most cases months or years in the making, whereas the average newspaper assignment lasts for an hour or so. And while World Press Photo is global in scale, Photos 1440 is local and personal – you’ll know many the places and perhaps even recognise some of the faces.
These are two neatly contrasting exhibitions for you to take in, both opening this Saturday and both are free.
Leave a Reply