The Death of Photojournalism

I'm going to keep this short because I think Vincent Laforet's recent post sums up my thoughts fairly accurately, but stories like this one make me livid. From Rob's post:

Dear XXXXX,

We would like to publish your photo in Time Magazine in a year-end issue and also on Time.com. If you are the author of the photo and can give Time the rights to publish it, please send a high-resolution image to xxxxxxxx@timemagazine.com. While we can’t pay you for this use, we’ll give you an author’s photo credit with the published photo in the magazine and of course you retain the copyright.

Thank you for your participation.

Sincerely,

XXXXX

Time, I don't care how badly you're suffering right now, this is nothing short of taking advantage of photographers who simply don't know better and screwing over those who do. It's one thing to solicit unpaid contributions from photographers and writers in crowdsourcing-type projects; it's another thing entirely to value someone's work at, oh, NOTHING. And lowering publication standards to go with a free alternative is just sad.

Good photography will always be expensive.

Happy New Year!

...and be sure to check out the NYTimes' annual The Year in Pictures page for a wonderful retrospective of 2007.

Whatever Pays the Bills, Right?

I am some combination of amused, horrified, and disturbed that the photographer who so thoroughly captured a bawling Paris Hilton as she was carted back to jail two days ago took the above photograph of a naked Vietnamese girl running away from a napalm blast exactly 35 years prior.

Photo Essay in Today's Spectator

"Your Hate Is Not Welcome On Our Campus"

Photos from a lecture Norman Finkelstein delivered on Columbia's campus this evening entitled “Israel and Palestine: Misuse of Anti-Semitism, Abuse of History.”



I mind my own business when I'm on photo assignments. This is mostly because I like working alone (I firmly believe that almost all journalists are deeply antisocial, and in fact only speak with other people in order to better make fun of them in an appropriately cynical fashion), but also because it's simply more efficient to get in, take the necessary photos, and get out. I am also a firm believer in the 'more is better' principle, which means that I walk away from any given assignment with somewhere between 100 and 600 photos.



This evening was no different. Norman Finkelstein's visit to a heavily Jewish campus only recently recovering from last year's MEALAC controversy was, unsurprisingly, not well-received. There were protestors lined up outside of Columbia's Lerner Hall, and the Roone Arledge Auditorium was filled with students wearing fliers that read "Norman Finkelstein, YOUR HATE IS NOT WELCOME ON THIS CAMPUS." Photo ops were plentiful, and my soul rejoiced.



Ordinarily, at the end of each assignment I go through the hundreds of photos and pick 10 or so that I really like and send them in to The Spectator. One runs, and the others disappear into the ethers of my hard drive. From now on, however, I think I'm going to use this blog as a place to post photo runoff (instead of at SpecBlogs, where five photos of one subject quickly become tedious).



So, voila. The Daily News' photographer may have taken better photos than me, but those won't be circulated until tomorrow morning...