Photography is a remarkable media. An image freezes time and can describe a given moment more intimately and emotionally than words. However, this capacity is a double edged sword. Photography can capture and praise pure tranquility equally as it can depict the most disgraceful and horrific pain and terror. Appreciation of an image is affected by its presentation to a viewer. Photography’s power rests on how an audience receives an image as much as what the image's content depicts. Tranquility and pain are at odds with each other and must be appreciated differently. Photojournalism, though, must approach sensitive topics, such as civil wars, carefully. Journalist, by their nature, should report facts as plain and unbiasedly as possible. Photojournalists ought to abide that same expectation, especially when handling emotional and painful subjects. Sensationalizing pain and suffering causes the image to be viewed trivially and further removes solemnity from the photo. If the ultimate purpose of photography is to document, and raise awareness for, a cause, depicting pain, terror, and suffering is necessary for photojournalists. However the glorification of that pain and suffering and making that terror aesthetically pleasing detracts from the integrity and intent of photojournalism.
The 2011 World Press Photo Contest featured many images of pain and suffering. Some photographers recorded their images better than others, in the sense that some pictures were purposeful in documenting, without sensationalizing, the subject. Daniel Morel’s images from the Haiti earthquake aftermath reflect photojournalistic integrity. His pictures are nontechnical. They simplistically capture the aftermath, and their frankness is exemplified by leaving untouched blur and chaotic composition. In another entry, photographer Fernando Moleres captures the pain and suffering at Pademba Road Prison, in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The photos are serious as shown in the faces of the people captured in the image. They are not glorified nor shot to be solely aesthetically pleasing.
Pleasing visual composition and documentary integrity are not mutually exclusive though. Christophe Archambault shot a volcanic explosion at Mount Bromo, in East Java, Indonesia. The photos are visually pleasing. While the color contrasts well, the images still capture the atmosphere of the explosion and of the people living in the volcano’s wake. Although these photographs were shot with composition clearly in mind, they still convey the bleakness and hazard of the event. Similarly to Archambault’s shots, Kemal Jufri recorded the explosion of Mount Merapi, in Central Java, Indonesia. These photos too are almost surreal, yet their supernatural tone accentuates the raw nature of the volcano’s wrath. The still images contrast well against the album’s action shots, which show rescue workers running from sub-explosions or working to help survivors.
These records of events are starkly contrasted against examples of sensationalized photojournalism. These examples depict pain and suffering too, but lack gravity. The audience is not affected by these because their focus was not on solidifying the suffering of the subject in the context of a social horror. These photos lack the raw terror of their subject and empathy must be actively conjured instead of implicitly felt. Javier Manzano’s photo is a prime example. The subject is offset from the photo’s center, far towards the image’s bottom. The sky bright and almost cheerful in contrast to the suffering of the subject.
Fernando Brito’s album takes sensationalization a step further. These photos are pretty. They do not communicate a story and they are just aesthetically photographed corpses. A photojournalist’s focus on composition in photojournalism is fine when emphasis is on the hazard and the horror. This artist, however, use death to create pretty pictures. The background imagry of sunsets and windswept grass does not convey the chaos of the supposedly war-torn region of northern Mexico. The audience obviously knows the environment of the photo is painful, but only because there are recognizably dead bodies.
A different example is shown in the pictures by Benjamin Lowry who captured the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. His photographs tell no story, and in fact are not readily recognizable for what they are if not for the caption. The pictures look supernatural, almost cosmic in origin. No effects of the spill are shown and the photo’s purpose is simply oil, made to look aesthetically pleasing. These photos are macro shots glorifying the spill instead of reflecting what was an environmental disaster. If my life had been destroyed by the oil spill, I'd be enraged to discover shots like this were receiving attention at examples of photojournalism. There is no human or environmental message here.
It is important for photojournalists to convey a story. When that story depicts pain and suffering, the journalist ought to handle the subject candidly and without exaggerating the aesthetic aspects of the image. The beautification by Brito and Lowry of their subject are pristine examples of how solemn pictures, meant to realistically document an event, are altered and intentionally composed to be visually pleasing. Their pictures fail to satisfy the standard of photojournalism as the larger circumstance in which their pictures were taken is not revealed to the audience. It is impossible to know that Brito meant to record the conflict in northern Mexico, or that Lowry’s intention was to document the deep water spill. These pictures can be appreciated in their own right as pieces of visual artwork. However, they do not satisfy photojournalism’s goal to record and document history.
