If you are one of the few who haven’t already taken time to read David Campbell’s post on photojournalism’s future duckrabbit highly recommends you do. Much of what he is saying is both simple and obvious, it’s just some photographers are still aching for a long lost dream whilst fading painfully into history. Others will change and make good.
The truth is there is no panacea for the crisis that photojournalism finds itself in. Despite the acres of crap written to the contrary photojournalism does not have itself to blame, nor are there internet models lurking out there, just waiting to be discovered, that are going to solve the problem.
Even if paywalls work, the revenues won’t fund photojournalists in any sustainable way. The money will go elsewhere.
The issue is an economic one. Photojournalism, or the single news image, has largely lost its value and it will not get it back again. The web will not save photojournalism, but it will continue to offer fresh opportunities to photojournalists who have the talent to shift the way they work and then market themselves.
The wires will continue to provide solid and sometimes brilliant photography from the world’s hot spots, so the artform will not disappear. Brilliant and inspiring on-line publications like Burn will publish self-funded stories which will mainly be viewed by other photographers. Burn will make a few quid but little of it will trickle down unless David can find a way to get the stories out beyond the magazine’s niche audience of would be Magnumites.
Where is there hope? Photography is great at selling things and that’s its biggest economic value. Photographers who become great storytellers will find work, but as David suggests they will need to embrace new ways of thinking. Isn’t that the way it’s always been?
Here’s a few words from Campbell, follow the link for the rest:
* The web is where it is at. Photographers must not ignore the full range of outlets (print media, books, exhibitions etc) but the Internet is the only platform with a growing audience for news stories
* To be on the web means producing multimedia stories. ‘Multimedia’ can mean many things, from simple photo galleries through to stand alone topic sites with stills, audio, video and text together, but it is the combination of sound and image which offers the basis for the most compelling form for storytelling
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