To isolate and exaggerate

You’ll so often see press photographers swarm to the arrest, the fight, the epicentre of the action of whatever incident it is they’re covering. Even at a largely peaceful public protest with perhaps just the one arrest for instance, great effort is given to capturing that moment in the strongest pictures possible. To the bystander this can sometimes appear to be an over reaction, sensationalist, inflammatory or even misrepresentative and of dubious journalistic merit.

But it has to be understood that in news photography there’s no going back. Once it’s happened, it’s gone, and if there’s a chance something is going to matter by the end of the day, you really must have been there at the start. You can’t stand back and let something pass you by, to then retrospectively consider its relative importance once you have a wider perspective to weigh it up against later. Unlike our reporter colleagues, for photographers there is no catching-up.

If you’re going to use a single image to tell a story as we do in newspapers, subtlety is often not an option. Unlike magazine reportage which might afford you an eight page spread, in newspapers it more often than not needs to be done with just one picture. So press photographers approach their work looking for that one distinct and succinct visual record.

They isolate the peak of action or the height of emotion to make the most compelling and striking visuals. But we come to the decision to publish them only when they are also a fair and reasonable record of the occasion.

It is not uncommon that a facial expression or similarly fleeting moment in time can actually offer the most poignant photograph of the day. For example’s sake, the modern politician or captain of industry is a very image savvy creature, who on the very worst day of his or her career will know not to let their feigned smile slip while the cameras are active, for it’s the visuals that will largely define the story for the evening news. But should they just momentarily reveal to us some sense of what’s really going on in their head that day, it is photography’s power to isolate that moment that surely offers a more representative record of events than would pictures of contrived smiles at a podium.

But for every such photograph, there are many aesthetically brilliant pictures lost. Moments emotive, shocking, beautiful, hilarious – that while great frames, on balance are not publishable because they lack that journalistic quality – they’re not a hand-on-your-heart, true and fair representation of the issue.

But it’s only by the photographer having been there in the first place to make the best possible pictures, that we’re in a position to make that decision later on.

wade@wadelaube.com

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