What's Wrong with Photojournalism?

Saw this today on Instagram, and it struck at something that has been troubling me for some time.

leica_camera #LOBA 2020 – Shortlist #2

_Cristina de Middel_ (@Lademiddel)
In her on-going project, Journey to the Center, the Spanish photographer (born 1975) makes reference to the surreal atmosphere and symbolism of the similarly titled novel by Jules Verne, as a way to present the current Central American migration route, through Mexico, as a daring and heroic journey. Documentation and fiction blend to create a multi-layered narrative.
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So, to start with, the Oskar Barnack Award is Leica's to give however they want. Unlike, say, the World Press Awards or POY or the Pulitzer, it doesn't have to do anything to represent the meaning or intent of photojournalism. It is whatever they say it is.

And who am I to say what Photojournalism (with a capital P) should be? Just another smart aleck with an opinion. So, with that out of the way ...

This is a prime example of really good artistic BS. The project "makes reference to the surreal atmosphere and symbolism" of Jules Verne, and "documentation and fiction blend to create a multi-layered narrative." What the F**k does that mean, exactly? Specifically: "Documentary and fiction blend?!" Isn't that when it ceases to be photojournalism?

I'm still looking as I write this, but the site for the Barnack award doesn't seem to have a page that simply states what it is, but they do have a page full of comments from the important people (all for more important that me) who nominate photographers and choose winners. They use words like "engaged photojournalism" and "contemporary reportage photography." These are words that, as an old school news photographer, make me nervous. These are the kind of big words that people use to hide their real meaning.

A Short Aside

It seems that every young journalist, photographer and writer, as well as the industry generally, goes through a phase now and again when they worry that they're not getting at the Truth. You know, the Truth with a capital T, the truth that just saying what happened doesn't seem to fully embrace. It's the Truth of what's really going on, that you, now that you've been on the ground and become the instant expert you're trained to become, now fully understand. Simply saying that this person did this, that person said that, this odd thing happened ... well, it just doesn't capture what it all means. People won't be made to fully understand, we need to do something more.

Often, the solution offered is to do more, like offer personal thoughts and impressions or better, different information, perhaps to blend in some fiction to, you know, make it more True. In other words, manipulate reality, make stuff up, lie. But to get closer to The Truth.

Back to My Point

Until Photoshop, changing up things in photography required a great deal of skill and effort, unless you staged things. (And staging things was fairly common and accepted back in the day; you don't want to know about some of your favorite, famous old LIFE magazine photos.) Staging has in modern times been frowned upon, unless of course you're making a portrait, for example, or maybe organizing something to get at the Truth.

And this brings me back to Cristina de Mideel's really nice photos. What she's done is cool, and interesting, and probably a subject that should be addressed (although it seems to me we have heard a lot about the struggle of immigration to the US, but that's a separate question). However, is it photojournalism? Is it even documentary photography? Is that little bit of fiction a toxic touch?

It reminds me of Alessio Mamo. He made pictures of Indians next to tables of luxurious, though fake, food to demonstrate their hunger. There was outrage when he posted some to the World Press Photo Instagram page. I, for one, was puzzled.

Wasn't this an example of advocacy journalism? Wasn't it an effort at "engaged photojournalism?" Wasn't he trying to dramatically demonstrate the Truth, using a little fiction?

This Is Nothing New, Really ...

I have written publicly on this sort of question before, for News Photographer magazine, covering questions about whether prizes were going to photographers covering the same sort of things over and over. And lately, there has been a bit of a backlash from old school photographers like David Burnett about a number of things from the Pulitzers (he wrote on Facebook about his frustration of the current tendency to award the prize to teams and staffs) to the controversial NPPA Bill of Photographers Rights (which contains criticism of the CIS gender male white gaze and suggests subjects give consent before being photographed, to oversimplify). I think this is a piece of the whole.

And of course, W. Eugene Smith's stories have met their share of criticism, Robert Capa's famous "Death of a Spanish Soldier" has long faced doubts, and as for seeking The Truth, Robert's brother Cornell formed the whole International Center for Photography as a place for the "concerned photographer." The search for the right way to portray The Truth is an old one.

But, honestly, I really wish we would just agree that news photography and photojournalism, though it involves choices as to what to photograph, not to mention a range of technical choices, should be about capturing what happens as it happens. No fiction, no big, fancy artsy words required.

Masque of the Red Death

I have taken to rereading Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities.

It seemed to be the thing to do in a time when we've elected a New York real estate mogul, one who sees himself as a Master of the Universe, as president, a time when we seem to reflexively treat the stock market as the economy (it isn't), a time when politics seem to exist only at the extreme fringes, and so on. In that way, I haven't been disappointed.

As an aside (my real point is upcoming), I wanted to look at Wolfe's writing. For those who don't remember (or weren't alive yet), the novel was written in monthly installments published in Rolling Stone magazine. Wolfe, always able to cause conversation, had decided that the great novels describing society and its times had died in the era since Thackeray, Zola, and Dickens. "Wolfe crashed into a literary scene that had grown timid, self-absorbed and, yes, dull," a Washington Post profile said in 2018. "Our brilliant young writers, he claimed, were afraid to capture the dazzling variety and absurd clashes of real life."

I had read it after it came out in book form and thought it good, with some reservations. I could see where Wolfe the wordsmith would become fascinated with an image or phrase, circling around and repeating it, then dropping it later as he did next month's installment. The same seemed true of characters, like the Ed Koch-like mayor of New York, who opens the book and then fades from view as the protagonist, bond trader Sherman McCoy takes center stage. But I would be a fool not to respect and admire (and occasionally imitate) the immortal talents and style of Wolfe, and I was searching for learning from a master.

Wolfe hits his stride a few chapters in, but I just finished reading one that seemed so to speak to today: Chapter 15, "The Masque of the Red Death," a 30-page description of McCoy's agonizing night at a posh social event among the elite of New York's social and business scene. On the way home, McCoy's socially conscious wife is unusually upbeat and chatty. Wolfe describes her evaluation of the party: "With a pretense of amused detachment, she burbled about the shrewdness with which Inez had chosen her celebrity all-stars: three titles (Baron Hochswald, Lord Gutt, and Lord Buffing), one ranking politician with a cosmopolitan cachet (Jacques Prudhomme), two designers (Ronald Vine and Barbara Cornagglia), three V.I.F.'s -- 'V.I.F.'s?' asked Sherman -- 'Very Important Fags,' said Judy, 'that's what everybody calls them' ..." and so on.

One of those V.I.F.'s, also a title, Lord Buffing, is an English poet who another guest tells McCoy is not just gay, but suffering from AIDs, the plague of the 1980s. In its day, more mysterious than COVID-19 ever was if not as contagious, it held the terror that leprosy carried in its time. No one knew what it was or how it was transmitted.

Buffing interrupts the party with a short speech when he is recognized by the host, and instead of a short, humorous thanks, he digresses into a meditation on Edgar Allen Poe's "Masque of the Red Death," a story about a Prince Prospero hosting a hedonistic two-year party behind locked palace doors to avoid a plague, only to be struck down in the most indulgent room by a mysterious guest dressed as Death.

"So Poe was kind enough to write the ending for us more than a hundred years ago," the ailing poet says to the silenced room. "Knowing that, who can possibly write all the sunnier passages that should come before? Not I, not I. The sickness -- the nausea -- the pitiless pain -- have ceased with the fever that maddened my brain -- with the fever called 'Living' -- those were among the last words he wrote ... No ... I cannot be the epic poet you deserve. I am too old and far too tired, too weary of the fever called 'Living,' and I value your company too much, your company and the whirl, the whirl, the whirl."

The jolly, self-indulgent crowd is brought down with a thump, silent after an evening of being a "noisy hive." "The intruder the [hosting] Bavardages dreaded most, silence, now commanded the room."

Before First World Problems became a hashtag (or there were hashtags), the ailing poet challenged the Prosperos of New York, locked in their penthouse palaces, safely buffered by the income disparities between them and those living in the Bronx. Wolfe is setting up the fall of the mighty McCoy at the hands of those he thinks beneath him, but he's also looking at that lurking monster, AIDs, still dangerously misunderstood before a certain Dr. Fauci led the effort to identify the virus that causes it and bring treatments.

The parallels and echoes to our time are hard to miss.

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

--Karl Marx