Photojournalism Dead? It's Just Changing With the Times
In the next 50 pages Nieman Reports take stock of photojournalism today. While problems are noted, the report is positive. The articles and the photo essays by 10 Nieman Fellows demonstrate the special value of pictures to news. As noted photographer Edward Steichen summed it up at the dinner celebrating his 90th birthday in 1969: “The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself. And that is no mean function.”
In editing our documentaries, the picture leads. Writing the narration is literally the last thing I do. That doesn’t mean I don’t have concrete ideas about the story, especially since I’ve usually spent a year reporting it. And it doesn’t mean that those ideas don’t have a lot to do with how we structure the film. But if the dramatic structure works better in a different way than I might have written it if I were writing a story, we let the film structure lead. I can make the words work to the pictures. So literally, I don’t write a script ahead of time. It sometimes drives executive producers crazy. We try to make the film work as a film, as if you could almost watch it without being told what’s going on from a narrator—and then I start writing the words.—Sherry Jones, head of Washington Media Associates, who has produced 20 films for PBS’s “Frontline,” at a Nieman Fellows seminar January 23, 1998.
