Some days, when I have a break between classes, I usually go to the Union, not for any reason in particular, but almost always end up going to the bookstore there. Most, well, actually all of the time, I venture to the photography section and thumb through the multitude of photographic coffee table books. I actually have a few of these, including Life magazine's "100 Photographs that Changed the World."
Life magazine, though, doesn't exist in the way it used to. Now, it gets stuffed into newspapers every week and doesn't have the presence it had during the mid-twentieth century. Now, thanks to changing economics, photojournalists don't have a way to showcase a collection of photos for a story. Most of the time, it's only one or two pictures that an editor chooses to tell the complete story.
"The ink costs too much," they'll say. "There isn't enough room."
Well, kudos, again, to the Internet for changing that.
The New York Times and MSNBC are perhaps the most reputable news organizations that are utilizing the Internet to take photojournalism to a whole new level.
Most people are familiar with MSNBC's Week in Pictures, an interactive slide show that lets the user navigate through a collection of pictures that best define what happened during the week. Last week, after Hurricane Ivan's wrath, the Week in Pictures had emotional images of a girl crying after she discovered that her childhood home was left in ruins, but also had pictures of a cowboy riding into the sunset after a small town rodeo. Rather iconic, but almost no one would have seen that picture if it wasn't on the Internet.
The New York Times, though, takes the standard slide show format in some cases, but for some stories it combines audio and photographs to make a not-a-movie-but-not-just-a-photo-gallery-either type of thing it calls an audio slide show. Very cool. Granted, it doesn't allow the user to surf through the pictures themselves, but if it's done well, you can't take your eyes and ears away from it.
To me, what most news web sites do in terms of a "photo gallery" is nothing more than shovelware; they take the pictures from the story, add all the ones that didn't make the final edit, and write cutlines. Still effective, but nothing compared to what the Times or MSNBC are doing.
For photojournalists, the Internet is a godsend. Finally, they can display all the photos they want and not kill more trees and waste more ink. Finally, they can tell the complete story and not rely on one or two pictures to do the job.
I'll still buy my books, though. They do look good on my coffee table.
Leave a comment