Mastering the technical aspects of photography is perhaps the easiest part of this field. What do you do with your new found expertise? This is the question I often ask of my students. Photography is not so much about the what or the how.
Photography is about the why.
A young boy discovers a skull of a victim of the Rwandan Genocide. © Damaso Reyes
Why are you taking this photograph? Once you can answer this question the how becomes much easier to understand. Of course many photographers never answer they why of what they do, they simply take whatever job and the money that comes with it. On the one hand I suppose this is perfectly reasonable, assuming you don’t mind simply being a craftsperson. It is a venerable profession but one that I am not that interested in. I want to be more than someone who takes good pictures; I strive to create images which transcend the moment in which they were created and represent something larger than themselves.
Many photojournalists, and many more editors if I might make an observation, are simply concerned with the transmission of information. This, of course, is important and necessary, just as stenography is.
Turkish girls wait for the metro in Berlin. Germany 2006. © Damaso Reyes
I didn’t sign up to become a court reporter.
The truth of the matter is that the stenographers are winning. The space in which long form and documentary photojournalism exists is continuing to shrink and until the next venue which can support this work becomes a reality more and more people are leaving this field. Of even more concern is that while there are many committed photojournalists who stubbornly keep doing the work that is important to them it is increasingly becoming difficult to do that work. If a story is too obscure, too far away or not in a hot spot, no one, at least in the newspaper and magazine world, wants to pay for it.
There has to be another way.
As long as we remain passionate about the why of what we do I believe documentary photojournalism will survive. As in many things in life, you have to have faith…
Traditional singing in Brittany. France 2008.
