Photojournalism

The project documented in photographs and text, the lives of the street people of London and established social documentary photography as a form of photojournalism.

In March 1886, when General George Crook received word that the Apache leader Geronimo would negotiate surrender terms, photographer C. S. Fly took his equipment and attached himself to the military column.

[11] In 1887, flash powder was invented, enabling journalists such as Jacob Riis to photograph informal subjects indoors, which led to the landmark 1890 book How the Other Half Lives.

[17] It was made possible by the development of the compact commercial 35mm Leica camera in 1925, and the first flash bulbs between 1927 and 1930, which allowed the journalist true flexibility in taking pictures.

Famous photographers of the era included Robert Capa, Romano Cagnoni, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White and W. Eugene Smith.

[citation needed] Henri Cartier-Bresson is held by some to be the father of modern photojournalism,[25] although this appellation has been applied to various other photographers, such as Erich Salomon, whose candid pictures of political figures were novel in the 1930s.

[26] The photojournalism of, for example, Agustí Centelles played an important role in the propaganda efforts of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s.

[27] American journalist Julien Bryan photographed and filmed the beginning of the Second World War being under heavy German bombardment in September 1939 in Poland.

[29] Until the 1980s, most large newspapers were printed with turn-of-the-century "letterpress" technology using easily smudged oil-based ink, off-white, low-quality "newsprint" paper, and coarse engraving screens.

[citation needed] By contrast Life, one of America's most popular weekly magazines from 1936 through the early 1970s, was filled with photographs reproduced beautifully on oversize 11×14-inch pages, using fine engraving screens, high-quality inks, and glossy paper.

Life became a standard by which the public judged photography, and many of today's photo books celebrate "photojournalism" as if it had been the exclusive province of near-celebrity magazine photographers.

VII Photo Agency was founded in September 2001 and got its name from the original seven founders, Alexandra Boulat, Ron Haviv, Gary Knight, Antonin Kratochvil, Christopher Morris, James Nachtwey and John Stanmeyer.

The photograph of the street execution of a Viet Cong soldier during the Vietnam War provoked a lot of interest because it captured the exact moment of death.

Bill Hudson was in Birmingham, Alabama on a quest to document the peaceful protests of the movement when he took a photo of high school student Walter Gadsden.

Due to the bulkiness and types of cameras present during past wars in history, it was rare when a photograph could capture a spontaneous news event.

[citation needed] Often, ethical conflicts can be mitigated or enhanced by the actions of a sub-editor or picture editor, who takes control of the images once they have been delivered to the news organization.

Mike Meadows, a veteran photographer of the Los Angeles Times, was covering a major wild fire sweeping southern California on 27 October 1993.

His picture of a Los Angeles County firefighter, Mike Alves cooling himself off with water in a pool in Altadena ran both in the Times and nationally.

"[43][44] Edward Keating, a Pulitzer Prize winner from The New York Times, photographed a young boy pointing a toy gun outside a Middle Eastern grocery store, near a town where the FBI raided an alleged Al Qaeda cell.

As a result, they had to deal with not only war conditions, but their pictures often required long shutter speeds, and they had to prepare each plate before taking the shot and develop it immediately after.

[49] Content remains the most important element of photojournalism, but the ability to extend deadlines with rapid gathering and editing of images has brought significant changes.

Even by the end of the 1990s – when digital cameras such as the Nikon D1 and the Canon EOS D30 were still in their infancy – nearly 30 minutes were needed to scan and transmit a single color photograph from a remote location to a news office for printing.

Now, equipped with a digital camera, a mobile phone and a laptop computer, a photojournalist can send a high-quality image in minutes, even seconds after an event occurs.

[citation needed] There is some concern by news photographers that the profession of photojournalism as it is known today could change to such a degree that it is unrecognizable as image-capturing technology naturally progresses.

Paul Levinson attributes this shift to the Kodak camera, one of the first cheap and accessible photo technologies that "put a piece of visual reality into every person's potential grasp.

In recent years, as social media has become the major platform on which people receive news and share events, phone photography is gaining popularity as the primary tool for online visual communication.

[citation needed] Once the pictures are uploaded onto social media, photographers can immediately expose their work to a wide range of audiences and receive real-time feedback from them.

With a large number of active participants online, the pictures could also be spread out in a short period of time, thus evoking profound influence on society.

[citation needed] Having noticed the advantages of the combination of social media and Phoneography, some well-known newspapers, news magazines and professional photojournalists decided to employ phone journalism as a new approach.

One of the shots, raging ocean waves collapsing on Coney Island in Brooklyn, taken by Benjamin Lowy, made the cover of Time's November 12 issue.