There Are Not Ten Million Photojournalists with iPhones

Contrary to the recent smartphone ad, anyone with a camera of some sort is not a "photojournalist," for the same reason that someone with a stethoscope is not a doctor.  They are people with cameras who might make an image of something happening, and like fish roe, one in ten-thousand may survive to become a decent picture.

With the recent events around the Boston Marathon bombing, there has been a useful illustration and, secondarily, reaction to emphasize this point.  Kenneth Jarecke made the point extremely well in his blog, and even one of the photographers there, the man who made what may become the iconographic images of the initial event, said it very clearly and well in an interview with Poynter.

"What newspapers and professional journalists need to realize, and the world has to realize," John Tlumacki said at the very end of the piece, "is that we are news photographers, not somebody out there with an iPhone and a camera, jumping over people to put images on YouTube. Our job is act as professionals and to show the world images that they can’t see because they aren’t there.

"I’m so sick of citizen journalism, which kind of dilutes the real professionals’ work. I am promoting real journalism, because I think that what we do is kind of unappreciated and slips into the background."

I recently did a book review for NPPA's News Photographer magazine that, I fear, morphed into a rant about one-man-bands in television news and all the other ills (many corporate driven in a blind, uneducated effort to save a few pennies) that have begun to grind my gears recently.  In it, I cited an event I experienced, where a TV station executive blithely announced to his news staff, including a number of photographers, that "all the best news pictures through history were shot by amateurs." He smiled, as if to soften the blow, and began to run on for a while about the Zapruder Film.

We can laugh about it, we can hope it goes away when the truth becomes obvious, we can scream and weep about it, but I can't help but sense that this is all just a part of the coarsening and decay of the quality of journalism and news.

Our viewers are our eyes...

I actually heard this on the local news tonight.

After showing a collection of photos of our weather -- a surprisingly strong snow storm -- the Sunday anchor said, "We love our viewers' pictures.  Really, our viewers are our eyes and our ears out there."  Now let us pause for a moment to contemplate the many meanings of this.

First of all, aren't you the news show?  As viewers, shouldn't we be waiting at home for you to be our eyes and ears in the community? I know you can't be everywhere, but we as individuals can be only in one place, and be there not as professional observers and reporters.

Secondly, as a professional journalist and especially as a photographer, I'd like to make my public declaration of objection to the increasing dependence on free pictures sent in by innocent people.  This is wrong in so many ways, and before you say it's sour grapes on my part (I'll squeeze those grapes in a moment), let me say that they are ripping you, the innocent who sent in his picture, off.  You should be paid for this stuff.  You put in an effort, and you expended some (although with digital photography, minimal) expense.  They owe you for your work.

And this is work, which gets to the sour grapes.  I do this stuff for a living, people, and you're just giving it away?  And they'll gobble it up, because that means some smart, creative, hardworking person won't have to be paid.  How would you like it if someone just walked in and did your job for nothing?  "But," you'll say, "I'm a doctor" or lawyer or insurance salesman or whatever.  "It's dangerous for any old person to do this.  They'll screw it all up."  Well, believe it or not, you can screw up photojournalism too.  Ever heard of the phrase "out of context?"  How about "misidentified?"  All of this leads to the lawyers doing their job, called "libel" ... at best.  At worst, a large part of a community can be left with a very wrong impression about something.  After all, they saw a picture, and photography is never wrong ... right?  But let's just let out the sour in the grapes: you do your job and I'll do mine.  Okay?

Finally, I can't help but be amused (and in some ways impressed) by the philosophical conundrum in the statement.  "Our viewers are our eyes."  Einstein would have had a field day, or maybe Heisenberg.  Can the viewer be the viewed?  Or create the object the viewer views? How does that affect the reality of the thing viewed?  Is it trapped in an infinite loop, like when two mirrors reflect one another?  Does that mean, in a philosophical sense, the local TV news has an audience of one ... over and over and over and over again?  What would be the Neilsen rating for infinity?