Every Picture Tells A Story - Some Not As Well As Others
By John David Powell (07/01/03)
Henceforth and forever more, the woman shall be known as “The lady with a butt as wide as a stack of books.”
The Associated Press photo from inside a warehouse in England accompanied a story about Amazon.com. It appeared on the front page of the June 23 Business &Technology section of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. The cutline explained how Amazon’s ability to process huge numbers of orders has led other major retailers to rely on Amazon to help move product.
There was no mention of book-wide butts.
This brings me to another of my obsessions. Publication photos. The pictures that tell the stories we don’t have the time or the interest to read.
Taking good, usable photographs is not as easy as point and shoot. A good photographer looks for the story within the frame. The only thing we learn from most photographs, however, is that photographers and editors are lazy. What other reason is there for the proliferation of poor pictures in papers and other publications?
A monkeypox on news conference photos! We need an international treaty that bans these poor excuses for photojournalism. News conferences are boring, unimaginative, and designed to put reporters to sleep. The only role a photographer plays at one of these shindigs is keeping the reporter awake. When an editor allows a photographer to take news conference pictures, the result is what ran on the front page of the June 21 Houston Chronicle. There was Houston police chief C.O. Bradford behind a gaggle of microphones at his I-am-not-a-doofus news conference, his mouth open and a goofy look on his face. In place of that boring photo, the editor should have demanded a shot of Bradford doing something chiefly. That, though, would have required a little effort. Or maybe a lot of effort, in this case.
Staged photos are really, really ugly. They look staged, and they are, well, really, really ugly. The front page of the Chronicle’s City and State section on June 23 carried a story about lawyers dropping their casual courtroom attire in favor of traditional, though tastefully expensive, suits and ties. Instead of getting a shot of well-dressed attorneys hanging out at the courthouse doing lawyer stuff, the paper’s editors staged a shoot in a high-rise office, with a nice view of the city and a couple of guys in suits and ties pretending to read legal papers.
Note to editor: Women are lawyers, too.
Sports editors and photographers have the easiest jobs in journalism. No one cares about proper grammar on the sports pages, and athletes are always doing things to themselves or other athletes that make for good art. One would be hard pressed to find a bad sports picture, even in the Chronicle. The June 23 edition had all the typical jock pix. Ballplayer smelling his arm pit. Ballplayer jumping in place. Ballplayers hitting, running, and high-fiving. The only picture missing was a ballplayer spitting or touching himself.
Weekly community newspapers have a hard mission when it comes to photos. They must carry a minimum of 650 local faces in each edition. This quota does not leave much room for creativity, which is why you see a lot of gripping and grinning, ribbon cuttings, students of the month, and homeless pets.
The Citizen, my suburban paper, recently carried a bunch of pictures of what appeared to be community swells at some fundraising function. Their faces were so blurred that only DNA testing and a mother’s love could identify them.
Composition is pretty key, too. Proper composition requires framing the subjects in ways that keep flowers or light poles from growing out of their heads. Someone at Agence France-Presse doesn’t like Mohammed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Most AFP photographs of ElBaradei have the guy looking like a complete bozo, as in Bozo the Clown, with olive branches coming out of his ears and atoms swirling above his head like drunken gargoyles in the architecture.
Who can explain the picture of two and a half individuals on the front page of the Blytheville (Ark.) Courier News on June 20? The woman in the middle had her right arm around her friend, while her left arm held half a child. I assume the child started out whole until some ink-drunk editor cropped her down the middle.
On occasion, one runs across a photo that deserves saving. I have only one taped to my wall. John Everett of the Houston Chronicle took it. No one is dead. No one is grieving. It contains no flames or things blowing up. It is a simple shot of a tearful woman sitting in the backseat of a car, waving goodbye to the hospital transplant coordinator who is out of the frame.
The woman received an experimental pancreatic islet cell transplant for severe Type I diabetes a few days earlier. She left the hospital cured. The picture allowed the reader to feel the moment’s full range of emotions.
That, my friends, is the way it is supposed to be.
First published at www.EtherZone.com
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