Introducation to the History of Photojournalism

 

 

What is photojournalism? Photojournalism is a visual representation of a story. In an article I found online, they describe photojournalism by saying, “Photojournalism is the process of story telling using the medium of photography as your main story telling device. While a journalist will use their pen and paper to tell stories, a photojournalist will use their camera to capture the visual representation of a story.” I believe this is a great way of saying what photojournalist do.

As John Nordell stated in his video “It started with Mathew Brady’s photograph from the Civil War, to be considered by many to be the beginning of photojournalism.” It started with exhibits where people would stand in line to see the photographs. When technology increased people were able to bring pictures in newspapers. Today there are many other ways such as online newspapers, blogs, etc. Many photojournalist will photograph war sense.

Zoriah said in the clip on the show “In Harms Way”, “It’s an old war photography saying that everybody wants to get an image that will stop war.” Since people cannot be there photojournalist take images to show people in different places what is going on. Photojournalism lets people see what is going on around the world, to be able to actual see the beauty in other places, or pain that others are going through.

Photo by Zoriah Miller
Image Source: http://www.taringa.net/posts/info/1455303/Zoriah-Miller.html

 

 In James Nachtwey clip, he says, “It’s occurred to me, that if everyone could be there just once, to see for themselves…what unspeakable pain of the impact of a single bullet… if everyone could be there to see for themselves the fear and grief just one time, they would understand that nothing is worth getting to that point where that happens to one person, let alone a thousand.” There photojournalist want people to see the pain of war, they want war to end, and for people to understand we should not be doing this to each other, we would not want to be in that pain so why put others in that pain.

Photo by James Nachtwey
Image Source: https://treacureps.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/james-natchwey-sebagai-fotografer-perang-dan-sosial/

 It is important to understand the history of photojournalism to understand the point to the images we see, and why people take their images, and some even put there life on the line to get that image to show us things we cannot see.