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.”
It was in the 1972 campaign, during a George McGovern rally in a city long forgotten, that I saw a photograph I ache to have made.
In shirtsleeves, the Democratic presidential candidate was addressing a sun-drenched crowd from a podium on a flatbed truck. In those less-apprehensive days, a motley group of supporters and onlookers formed a backdrop behind him on a riser, a human pyramid in which one young man, standing just above McGovern, held onto a dog as the candidate spoke.
The tableau was part Americana, part theater of the absurd. In a trick of perspective, the dog seemed to be drooling on McGovern’s bald head.
I longed for a camera. But I was there as a reporter and all I had was a notebook. To the best of my knowledge, the picture was never made; it exists only in memory.
In shirtsleeves, the Democratic presidential candidate was addressing a sun-drenched crowd from a podium on a flatbed truck. In those less-apprehensive days, a motley group of supporters and onlookers formed a backdrop behind him on a riser, a human pyramid in which one young man, standing just above McGovern, held onto a dog as the candidate spoke.
The tableau was part Americana, part theater of the absurd. In a trick of perspective, the dog seemed to be drooling on McGovern’s bald head.
I longed for a camera. But I was there as a reporter and all I had was a notebook. To the best of my knowledge, the picture was never made; it exists only in memory.
