| reportage Moving pictures | |
| Colin Jacobson
Good photojournalists constantly worry whether their pictures are touching the audience. There's nothing more humiliating than photographs which glide past the eye, moments in time worked at so hard which fail to evoke a response. |
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| Winter 1998 | Tom Stoddart (IPG) and related links | Archive | Back | Next | 9 of 10 | |
Just as bad are those images which photographers produce for full- frontal engagement, packed with visual excitement but signifying nothing. Modern sound-bite journalism pushes photographers to go over the top for fear of ‘losing’ the reader. But what are they really losing, if the reader takes nothing from a picture except a visual thrill? Contemporary critics of ‘classical’ photojournalism tend to concentrate their assault on the familiarity factor. We’ve seen it all before, nothing can surprise us anymore, there’s nothing left to reveal in this era of the electronic global village. It’s all so boring, and especially if it’s in black and white. And then there’s the myth of objectivity. The vice-like mental grip of post-modernism persuades us that there’s nothing out there to believe in anymore. There are no shared truths—everything is personal expression, a point of view, an attitude. Fortunately, the general public are disinclined to go along with the brainy philosophers and erudite critics who cast doubt upon common experience. Without requiring absolute truth, they are prepared to accept that if a person steps off the roof of a skyscraper, they will fall downwards and not upwards, whatever their spiritual, cultural, social or ethnic background may be. Moreover, most people are prepared to believe that a photograph taken of the remains of the person at the foot of the skyscraper is an acceptable form of evidence that something dreadful has happened. Of course, the people can be fooled some of the time. Digital or conventional picture manipulation can easily change the meaning of images, and different people can read different meanings into the same picture. In the end, perhaps, it all comes down to trust. I don’t think any intelligent photojournalist believes they are able to capture the truth, and nothing but the truth. They accept that what they depict in their work is the truth as they saw it, that their photographs reflect a form of truthfulness about a particular situation, event, person, mood or atmosphere. Like any other journalism, photojournalism is a form of interpretation and story-telling, and it is the readers who have to decide whether they believe the story they are being told or not. Their decision is likely to be based on a number of factors, such as the nature of the publication, the reputation of the photographer, the context in which the work is being published, but above all, perhaps, the quality and sense of authenticity of the photographs themselves. Which brings us to the work in question, Tom Stoddart’s harrowing vision of the famine in Sudan. Earlier this year, Clare Short, the British Secretary of State for International Development, made a well-publicised attack on what she saw as the gratuitous use of photographs such as Stoddart’s by aid agencies for the purposes of raising money. Her argument was that the famine in Sudan was the result of political decisions, and throwing money at the problem was just a distraction. She may well be right, but this displays a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature and role of creative photojournalism. Many people responded to Stoddart’s images by sending money—a gut response to a dreadful situation. Perhaps they had no idea if their contribution would make any real difference but felt the need to do something anyway. At a less tangible level, the same readers, and many others, may find that they have absorbed these photographs into some part of their psyche and cannot shake loose of them. The best kind of photojournalism stays with people and becomes a civilizing influence in their lives, part of a process of revelation, communication, knowledge and awareness, none of which can be measured in pounds and pence. Stoddart’s photographs from Sudan belong to this tradition of photojournalism which can change the way we relate to the world. The pictures shown here are not just visual clichés, rattled off quickly to catch a deadline. They persuade us to respond to the feelings of those who appear in them. They are the result of concern, passion and commitment, qualities which saturate the images. Stoddart is also a talented visual storyteller. And that, ultimately, is what holds our gaze. |
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| Winter 1998 | Tom Stoddart (IPG) and related links | Archive | Back | Next | 9 of 10 | |