Behind the Scenes: How Conflict Photographs Come To Be

First time accepted submitter benro03 writes "Airing photojournalism's dirty secret, Italian photographer Ruben Salvadori demonstrates how conflict photography is often staged by the photographers themselves. He spent a significant amount of time in East Jerusalem studying the role that photojournalists play in what the world sees. Ruben is about to graduate with dual majors for a BA in International Relations and Anthropology/Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel." Some commenters on the linked story defend much of what's shown as ordinary aesthetic and editorial decisions; doubtless a parallel documentary could have been shot from a few hundred yards away with an opposite slant.

Comments

Simple rule of thumb

[JazzHarper]

All photography is staged unless the image has been captured unintentionally or accidentally.

Pictures are not that much different than words...

[Gavin Scott]

The Journalist observes and then writes words that try to communicate his/her understanding of the situation.

The Photojournalist observes and then takes pictures that try to capture the essence of the situation as he/she understands it.

If you don't want someone else interpreting and summarizing for you, then go there yourself.

We read and view the work of journalists because we want to understand but we don't want to do all the raw data collection and reduction ourselves. To the degree that journalists exhibit biases of one sort or another, we try to chose sources that exhibit similar biases to our own such that their interpretation and analysis will likely be the same (or at least similar) to our own. When the bias is for sensationalism, that's simply not journalism.

G.