An interesting find on the NYT Web site, that raises the issue of what counts as photojournalism. At question is a recent award a NYT photographer won for chronicling our troops in Afghanistan, using his iPhone as his camera AND using an iPhone app called Hipstamatic to alter the photos. The photos are fabulous, but some critics claim that by using a program that makes the photos look more "cool," the result is no longer photojournalism.
First, one of the photos:
The photographer responded:
We are being naïve if we think aesthetics do not play an important role in the way photojournalists tell a story. We are not walking photocopiers. We are storytellers. We observe, we chose moments, we frame little slices of our world with our viewfinders, we even decide how much or how little light will illuminate our subjects, and — yes — we choose what equipment to use. Through all of these decisions, we shape the way a story is told.He goes on to point out that the winning photo used a zoom lens and a small depth of field to single out the faces of the subjects. That's hardly how the scene looked to a real person live on the scene. Nor was the scene in black and white in real life, it was in b/w in the photo. Wasn't that playing with our emotions, and the photo to evoke something that wasn't really there?
I love my Hipstamatic app, and have been using it more than my real camera for a while now. Some of the photos are amazing, to my eye. Here are a few of mine.
In each photo, I "saw" something special that I wanted to capture, and the final photo does in fact capture the mood that I felt when snapping the shot. But, I certainly didn't know exactly what the Hipstamatic was going to do to the photo, not exactly, nor whether it would help or hurt the final product. In these three cases, I think it clearly helped. Does that mean these photos, while perhaps aesthetically pleasing, are not a true reflection of the scene itself? Are they simply "chance" and a gimmick, and not reflective of any skill on the part of the photographer? Does it matter if the photos are in fact a true reflection of the scene the photographer saw in his own photographer's mind's eye, and wanted to capture?
In other words, is this really photography, is it even art, or is it just a gimmick?
PS I'm also intrigued by the photographer's choice of using the iPhone instead of his professional camera. He notes in the piece that by using his cell phone cam he was able to put his subjects at ease - after all, who isn't used to their friends taking pictures with their cell phones. Somehow, a cell phone cam isn't as unnerving to its subjects as a real camera. Specifically, the photographer suggested that he'd have never been able to get the shot I posted at the beginning of this post had he used a real camera, the troops would have scattered.
