Endangered journalistic species I: Photographers

You can't sell news without pictures

Do you recognise this photograph?

It was taken on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima, at 12.15pm on February 23, 1945. Joe Rosenthal used a Speed Graphic camera set between f8 and f11 with a shutter speed of 1/400th of a second.

The picture earned him a Pulitzer prize and today, 68 years later, it is still reckoned to be the most reproduced photograph of all time. It has even been recreated in bronze as a memorial to the US Marines outside the Arlington national cemetery in Virginia.

Rosenthal was working for the Associated Press and was one of two professional photographers (the other was from Newsweek) on the little island with the Marines at this key moment of the Second World War. Within 18 hours the picture was being published in hundreds of newspapers across the world.

Do you recognise this photograph? 

If you read a newspaper or look on the web and have any interest in finance, pensions, care homes, property, heating bills or social benefits, the chances are that you'll have seen it at least once.

SubScribe can't help with the photographer or the circumstances of the session, other than that at least one other picture was taken and distributed. 

The picture has a certain elegance: the slim wrinkled hand, the long fingers undistorted by arthritis, the manicured, painted nails that suggest a more privileged life in the past. But it hardly captures a moment in history. Yet it has been used in papers and on websites over and over again.

Since 2009, the Sun and the BBC have each used it four times, the Guardian and Huffington Post six. I've placed it myself in The Times, as have my successors. ITV.com and the Express are really in love with it. They've used it 15 times apiece - three times in three weeks in March last year, in the case of the Express.

So what's so special about it that it has such constant and universal appeal? 

It's free.

You'll have seen this one - or a version of it - too. The street of estate agents' boards must be the ultimate in stock shots. House prices are of great interest to many people (almost as great and almost as many as the Express thinks) so stories about them going up, down or even stabilising eat up forests of newsprint. And they have to be illustrated. Unless you have a willing case study, it's complicated to find a specific house to photograph, so we all fall back on the boards or bunches of keys. 

It gets a bit tiring after a while - and telephone codes change, estate agents merge or go out of business, so the pictures need rethinking, reworking or at the very least updating. For that you have to have a photographer. And photographers cost money. Much cheaper to stick with the agency shots and take what you're given.

Stock shots have their place. They are readily accessible and a godsend when you have a difficult subject to illustrate, but they have no place in live news stories where the reader wants an image of the event. If you use one in such circumstances it is tantamount to admitting that you missed the story, got to the scene too late - or didn't have anyone to send.

The picture above shows how the Chicago Sun-Times presented the story when people queued round the block for a freebie chickenburger. The picture below, of customers waiting outside the diner,  is the rival Tribune's effort.

OK, so it's not the liveliest of pictures, though the two men in the foreground have charm. But at least it was taken on the spot and isn't a handout picture of a burger.

The reason for the difference has been well documented - the Sun-Times sacked its entire 28-strong picture department at the end of last month with the explanation that online readers wanted more videos and so big changes were necessary to facilitate that. But what about still pictures? Ah, reporters with iPhones and agencies would have that little problem covered.

The decision has been greeted with alarm and astonishment on both sides of the Atlantic. Which is apt because it is alarming and astonishing. A newspaper/website without a picture department? How can that work? How can any organisation lay off the likes of the legendary John H. White, below? 

White, 68, had worked at the Sun-Times for 35 years, and also taught photojournalism at two colleges.  In 1974, at a time when race issues were still explosive in many parts of America, he was commissioned by the Environment Protection Agency to document the lives of  African Americans who mainly lived in the deprived areas on the south side of the city. The community that emerged from his photographs was undoubtedly struggling, but it was also one capable of exuberance and grace. 

White was awarded the Pulitzer prize for feature photography in 1982 for 'consistently excellent work'. His portfolio included the picture above taken in the notorious Cabrini Green high-rise housing project, which has since been bulldozed. On accepting the award, he said: 'I don't really take pictures. I capture and share life. Moments come when pictures take themselves.' 

The White trophy cabinet also houses the Chicago medal of merit, five photographer of the year awards, three headliner of the year awards. He was also the first photographer to find a place in the Chicago journalism hall of fame. A shining star without doubt, but not the only one in the constellation. The scale of what the paper has thrown away is laid out in this article from American Photo magazine.

Chicago (as seen by White, above) regards itself as America's second city. A lot happens there - it's the world of Al Capone and of Barak Obama. History has been made there time and again, and local photographers have been there to record it. Not any more. 

Of course there are always agency photographers - Joe Rosenthal who took the Iwo Jima picture was one - but if you rely on them you are never going to have an exclusive on your own patch. And when you have a powerful rival like the doorstep like the Tribune, that's a risky position to put yourself in.

In the era of point-and-press megapixel cameras, we all think we're photographers; we share our efforts on Facebook and some of them are not bad. But we haven't been trained to choose the right angle, the right exposure, to judge the right moment as professionals have. Nor have the Sun-Times reporters. 

It's bringing the DIY mentality into the professional arena.

How hard is it to wield a paintbrush to brighten up the spare room? Not hard, but someone who has served an apprenticeship in painting and decorating will do the job far more effectively - and economically - than the home handyman. Once again, newspaper managements are devaluing the talents of their staff, discarding trained experts because they think they can get someone else to do it more cheaply. It's a flawed strategy.

The Chicago purge is an extreme example of economies being enforced all over the place. One national newspaper picture editor told me three or four years ago that the picture budget - including cartoons, drawings etc - for an entire department was £11 per day. Yes £11. Ok, this was on top of the subscriptions to the big agencies, but buy one mugshot from Alamy and he'd have blown two weeks' cash. The result, I was told, was that he had researchers on the phone all day begging company PRs for pictures.  That's why we pay specialists? To beg to PRs?

This approach is hard enough to comprehend in the context of newspapers, but when you think in terms of the digital age, it's bonkers. Websites and tablet editions are voracious consumers of pictures. Where a newspaper might have one or two per page, the digital versions require an image with every story. The demand for original photography will increase rather than diminish in the new era. How many times does an online reader want to see the same mugshot or stock photo?

The alternative, if there is an objection to paying agency fees, is the PR handout. These are already rather too much in evidence in so-called serious papers, particularly if they feature a comely woman. Here's Liz Hurley doing X or Pippa Middleton doing Y. Some papers have gone so far down this road that they can't even pick up on widely available agency photographs of true merit. 

Last Sunday the Moon was as close to Earth as it's going to be this year. Quite a sight. The Guardian treated readers to a splendid centre spread, the Independent also pushed the boat out. But you had to struggle to find even a single photograph in the other papers and some were so tiny and hidden in corners that they were barely distinguishable from the adverts. Pictures of Gwyneth Paltrow in her underwear (above in Friday's Telegraph)  preparing for a film or Glastonbury preparing for the crowds were, of course, so much more important.

If we've come to the point that we can't recognise special natural phenomena because we're so bound up with our 'up with the kids' news agendas, what hope is there for the spot news picture? And who's going to take it?

Let's go back to Chicago and Obama, reminding ourselves that this is the city in which he built his power base and is therefore the city that holds the key to elements of his personality, for example the White Sox fan pictured above. The home town papers need to be on the case take the opportunity to archive off-duty and off-beat moments that may have little significance now, but prove important or illuminating in decades to come.

Here's an example from the Thirties.

John Dillinger was a bank robber who, largely on account of escaping twice from jail, became America's first Public Enemy Number One and eventually met his end at the Biograph Theatre near Lincoln Park in Chicago in July 1934. 

A few months earlier, while being flown from St Louis to Chicago, Dillinger was approached by an enterprising young photographer seeking to make his name. The Chicago journalist Kevin Davis tells the story 

On a cold January day in 1934, my grandfather shot John Dillinger. Sol “Dixie” Davis steadied himself in front of the notorious bank robber, aimed his Speed Graphic 4-x-5 camera and took a picture. Dillinger, who was handcuffed and under police guard, let him take a few more photos and then said enough. “Taking these pictures’ll drive me screwy,” Dillinger said.

Dillinger was not in a good mood. He and members of his gang had just been captured in Tucson, Ariz. My Grandpa Sol, a photographer for the Chicago Daily Times, was riding in a plane with America’s most wanted fugitive. He got a tip that police were bringing Dillinger to Chicago and would stop in St. Louis to change planes. He drove down to St. Louis to get on that plane, and bought up all the empty seats so no other reporters or photographers could get on.

“Mr. Dillinger,” Sol said as he walked up the aisle after the plane took off.

“Whaddya want?” Dillinger barked.

“I’m the only cameraman on the ship. I want a break.”

“Whaddya want?” Dillinger asked again.

“I want some pictures.”

“All right, kid, go ahead and shoot.”

This is the resultant front page of the Daily Times, a forerunner of the Sun-Times.

To get a great news picture, you not only have to be in the right place at the right time, viewing from the right angle, but also have the experience to be aware of unexpected movements in your peripheral vision. 

If you are reporting on a story, you should be so busy focusing on what someone is saying that you will likely fail to spot what they - or anyone else - is doing.  Not only that,  to get that memorable shot you almost have to take the picture before the action starts. Anticipation and instinct are everything. But even if our reporter has them, how can he or she respond to the visual? It would be the height of bad manners to interrupt the conversation and hold up an iPhone to grab a picture.

No doubt the Sun-Times has done the calculations and concluded that its picture department is costing too many thousands of dollars for every exclusive photograph. In case other news organisations are planning to follow Chicago's lead, here are some instances of professional photographers' work that have not only impressed the reader, but also changed our view of the world.

 

Vietnam, 1968: The summary execution of  a Vietcong prisoner
 Eddie Adams, AP

Vietnam, 1972: Children flee napalm attack.
 Nick Ut, AP

Beijing, 1989: The 'unknown protester' defies tanks  in Tiananmen Square.
Jeff Widener, AP

Taj Mahal, 1992: Diana, Princess of Wales makes  a point about her marriage
 in front of the great monument to love. Tim Graham/Getty Images

For those with any kind of interest in newspaper photography, presentation and the importance of pictures, to my mind the bible is still Harry Evans's Pictures on a Page from 1978. It may sound antedeluvian, but there are a few managements and editors who could benefit from giving it a read.

*SubScribe is happy to give full credit for all pictures used on this website, since there is no intention to breach copyright. If your photograph appears and you wish to amend the credit, please email gameoldgirl@gmail.com

What do you think was the greatest news picture of all time? The greatest photographer? The best front page? The worst stock shot? Please share your opinions in the comments below or by clicking the address gameoldgirl@gmail.com

Thanks to CatbeL8 for four suggestions: the eruption of Mt St Helens in 1980, the Boeing 767 flying into South Tower  of the World Trade Center on 9/11,and these two examples of anticipation, instinct and quick thinking.

John F. Kennedy Jr salutes as his father's coffin passes on November 25, 1963. It was his third birthday.
The photograph was taken by Stan Stearns of United Press International. He had frequently covered Jacqueline Kennedy and so knew her habits.
Stearns therefore had his lens trained on Mrs Kennedy as the funeral cortege approached. He saw her bend and whisper to her son and suddenly the boy raised his right arm. 'The hand went up. Click - one exposure. That was it. That was the picture,' Stearns told the New York Times.
Stearns died, aged 76, in March last year.

Alfred Eisenstaedt explains how he captured this picture in Times Square on VJ Day in 1945. 'I saw this sailor grabbing any and every girl in sight. I was running ahead of him with my Leica looking over my shoulder but none of the pictures that were possible pleased me. Then suddenly in a flash I saw something white being grabbed. I turned round and clicked the moment the sailor. I took exactly four pictures. It was done within a few seconds.'



CatbeL8 also recommended Matthew Brady's photography from the American Civil War. There are many graphic images from the battlefields and the trenches. This one, from Gettysburg in 1863, is the sharpest and least gruesome I found, while still showing the abject misery of war.

How do you see the future of journalism? Do you still have a paper delivered or pick one up at the station on the way to work? Do you prefer print, Kindle or iPad? Or have you given up on the mainstream media and switched to Twitter and blogs? Please join in the SubScribe survey here. Thank you.

@gameoldgirl

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Women of note

Feminists face a tough battle, it's time for some tactical thinking

When you've been a woman for as long as I have - almost as long as the Queen's been the Queen - you get used to the way that sexism pervades our society.

It ranges from builders' wolf whistles to rape; from ironic references to cushions and hoovering to violence of the tongue as devastating as a blow to the stomach. And for all the equality laws of the past four decades, women are still lower paid and still find it harder to get full-time jobs.

There are the ignorant - people who lump women together with the disabled, homosexuals, immigrants and 'other minorities', forgetting that women are the majority - and the unthinking. Female votes put the brake on 80mph shouted the Times splash headline on Saturday, almost inviting every bloke who picked up the paper to blame the missus for spoiling the fun.

In fact most drivers, both male and female, were in favour of the higher limit. But Downing Street was apparently afraid of losing the votes of  women who were against the change and so abandoned the plan.

The logic of this escapes me, so I'll run through that again: 53% of women were in favour of an 80mph limit, 41% were not - so rather than upset the 41%, the plan was dropped. Sounds like nonsense, and of course it is. But it's so much easier to put the focus on unidentifiable 'females' than on the safety campaigners and vested interests that lobbied against the change.

When it comes to equality, certain sectors of society are locked in the first half of the last century,  most particularly business and finance, politics, the police and the media. They beat their chests and wring their hands saying 'We'd love more women to come forward/move up'. But they don't mean a word of it. They talk about ratios and quotas and positive discrimination.

Women don't need these things; the need is for there to be a will to treat everyone equally - for without that will, no artificial devices can correct the imbalance.

More women than men are qualifying as doctors, vets,  lawyers and dentists - the most competitive fields of study - and there are far more female undergraduates across our universities than there are male. So there is no doubt the talent is there, it just all goes pear-shaped in the workplace.

There are only three women at the helm of FTSE 100 companies because businesses and boardrooms are stuffed with stuffed shirts in black suits who think that a woman's role is the packed lunch in their briefcases. Tory deadwoodsmen in the shires are the same, picking wideboys over intelligent women as their parliamentary candidates. We had a woman prime minister once, didn't we? What more do we want? (The irony of that is that these diehards would have shaken the ladder as she climbed the first few rungs, and then ended up adoring her.)

But they've always been like that. They just need educating - though preferably not by the Australian political classes.

More worrying are the police and the media, who seem to be regressing towards the 19th century.

No matter how often codes of conduct are revised, no matter how many public inquiries condemn police practices, nothing seems to shift the mindset that only white men are worthy of respect - whether inside or outside of the force.

Meanwhile television networks that regard grey hair in male presenters as a sign of gravitas continue to push women off camera the moment the first wrinkle appears. Within the Press, middle-aged white men are again dominant in setting the news agendas while women, with few exceptions, are once more consigned to features or subordinate roles. This is especially galling after the great strides of the 80s and 90s.

Given all this, it's hardly surprising that there has been an upsurge in interest in the feminist movement - and the centenary this month of Emily Davison's Derby death has been a convenient peg for a new call to action.

Lest there is any doubt that action is required, take a look at the Everyday Sexism Project,   an alarming catalogue of evidence of the contempt in which women are held, especially by young men who should have been taught better by baby-boomer parents. Fresh examples appear on the site and on Twitter every minute (no exaggeration), here is a random selection:

@EverydaySexism "Can you give us a pole dance on that?" I'm a young disabled woman who needs to use a walking stick.
— thevenusenvy (@elouiseknoop) June 25, 2013

@EverydaySexism my dad just said:'Is this guy in the car in front of us a moron or is it just a woman?'
— Taylor (@Taylorbworth) June 25, 2013

In a meeting and an older woman says: Your man will get tired of you if you don't wear makeup and look good for him. @EverydaySexism #Gags
— Carina Camacho (@Carinaesque) June 25, 2013

@EverydaySexism Workman came to our house & suggested I go & "put the kettle on" while he & my husband "talk money" ... #everydaysexism ...
— JilliJazz (@JilliJazz) June 25, 2013

@EverydaySexism my boyfriend and I standing at the bar last night...the barmaid addressed him with "Can I see your girls ID?"
— Clare Taverner (@Clrtvrnr) June 25, 2013

@EverydaySexism getting asked 'are you on your period?' if you so much as dare to state a contrasting opinion in a slightly angry way to men
— Zo (@ZoeBaBoey) June 25, 2013

@EverydaySexism Man on night bus asking me about my night only to get off at my stop and push me against a wall for my number. Shoved & ran.
— Shambhavi Bhat (@Shambha_v) June 27, 2013

@EverydaySexism two dudes just stopped me for directions walking my dog and said I wanna bite your butt thru those f****** jeans
— bambi (@daniadderall) June 27, 2013

So how are we women countering the louts and the dinosaurs?

By demanding an end to page 3 girls and a petition to have a woman's picture on a banknote.

I'm treading on dangerous ground here, but these don't seem to me to be the vital issues of the day. Pretty young girls are queueing up to feature on page 3 and if they want to take off their bras and pose for photographs in the hope of advancing themselves, why stop them?  The budding lawyers, doctors, vets and dentists have their opportunities, is it right to deny those with a little less up top (but a bit more further down) their chance of a richer life?

Is it exploitative? Is it demeaning? Is it offensive? Perhaps, but I find I object more to the nudge, nudge, wink, wink captions than to the generally cheery photographs. I'm glad the days of women draping themselves over boats and cars are over, and I wouldn't be sorry to see page 3 disappear, but I think there are more troubling matters for feminists to worry about.

The No More Page 3 campaign believes, however, that the easy accessibility of what it describes as soft porn helps to shape men's view of women and diminishes their respect. Given the oafish behaviour detailed in Everyday Sexism, it is a fair argument.

The banknote campaign is different and, whisper it softly, I don't think it serves the feminist cause very well. You can never be equal if you need or demand special treatment.

The Bank of England clearly didn't think too long or hard, if at all, about the gender of the next person to be honoured on the £5 note. And that's a good thing.

In whatever walk of life or area of society, people should be treated in the way merited by their actions and achievements. It's a shame there will no longer be a woman other than the Queen on our currrency, but it would have been a greater shame if whoever chose the replacement for Elizabeth Fry had thought 'We'd better have another woman.'

Criado-Perez. Photograph: audioboo.fm

Caroline Criado-Perez has worked ferociously and tenaciously to garner nearly 30,000 signatures for her 'keep a woman on English banknotes' petition. That's some achievement, but no more than might be expected from Ms C-P, who is, by all accounts, one smart cookie. The Oxford graduate describes herself as a furious feminist and she is particularly angered by the under-representation and misrepresentation of women in the media. She has set up a website to ensure that female experts are available to offer opinions on any number of issues, she runs a blog with the slogan 'a pox on the patriarchy', and works as a freelance journalist - all the while studying for her master's.

In the course of her banknote campaign, she has written repeatedly to Sir Mervyn King, publishing the correspondence, and appeared in every national paper, the Huffington Post and on radio and television stations all over the country. Her efforts have wrong-footed the Governor to the point where he has been forced to say that the Bank has a contingency plan for someone other than Sir Winston Churchill to feature on the fiver and that Jane Austen is 'quietly waiting in the wings' to make her appearance.

Between them, they've stirred the pot so that every paper seems to be running 'Which woman should be on the banknote?' features. The same half dozen names appear at every turn - Mary Seacole, Ada Lovelace, Mary Wollstonecraft, Rosalind Franklin, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and the blessed Jane.

Odd that, isn't it? Well no. Asked to name great British women, most people run out of steam after Florence Nightingale and Elizabeth Fry, as the Bank seems to have done. Yet I'd bet that anyone could rattle off ten times as many men in sixty seconds flat - and be aware of why they were in the frame. You can see how easy it was for the Bank to fall into the trap.

My problem with the debate is the letter 'a'.
Keep a woman on English banknotes
Which woman should be on the fiver?

Imagine if that has been 'which man should be on the fiver?' Or 'which black/gay/blind person...'

This isn't equality, it's tokenism. It's as though the feminists are saying 'We don't care who it is, we just want a woman', while those (presumably men) commissioning the newspaper articles are saying 'If you were allowed one, who should it be?'

There have been many, many great men through British history - and rather fewer great women. There is an interesting debate to be held on what should be the criteria for recognition on a banknote, but gender ought not to be one of them. Should candidates be instantly recognisable to all Britons? Towering giants of the arts, science, social reform? People of international renown? Or people whose retrospective importance outweighs their fame?

If  the women's cause is to be advanced, then the latter needs to be emphasised. That way we would highlight the achievements of people whose efforts have been under-reported and under-estimated for decades. People like Rosalind Franklin, above, whose DNA X-ray work provided the vital key to the mapping of the human genome. She was sneered at and patronised in the lab by Crick and Watson, who danced off to collect their Nobel prizes and then took a quarter of a century to make grudging acknowledgement of her contribution.

Had Ms Criado-Perez approached the Bank (and the media) with an extensive list and said 'You know there are so many unsung British women who achieved great things, how about raising their profile by putting them [not "one of them"] on the currency?' she might have found that the door opened easily. The Bank would probably have been grateful for the suggestions.

Instead we have a campaign that has the air of women stamping their feet shouting 'It's not fair.'

And that means we also have men patting us on the head saying 'Calm down, dear, we'll give you that Pride and Prejudice woman next time...

'Now get back to the hoovering.'



SubScribe also writes about feminism in the posts The truth is never pure and rarely simple and Women's rights and wrongs.






How do you see the future of journalism? Do you still have a paper delivered or pick one up at the station? Do you prefer print, web, Kindle or iPad? Or have you given up on the mainstream media and moved to Twitter and blogs? Please join in the SubScribe survey here. Thank you.

@gameoldgirl

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Print v Digital, an unscientific survey

If we want everything for nothing, how will our culture survive?

How do you take your news? The old-fashioned way with tea and toast at the breakfast table? Downloaded to your iPad overnight? On the Kindle on the train? At your desk on the office computer? With Fiona or Huw or Natasha at one, six or ten? Between songs on 6Music? Or nonstop, courtesy of Google and Twitter buzzing in your pocket all day?

There are so many ways to keep up to the minute. Does anyone need newspapers any more? And if we do, what do we use them for? For most people, they have long since ceased to be the primary source of news, yet we retain an affection for them. They are more tactile than a screen. We can fold them up, tear out snippets, put big red circles round things we might want to buy. They may not be used to wrap fish and chips any more, but they are still a better flyswat than a smartphone.

We're still more likely to cut out a recipe that catches our eye than to print it off on the computer and will a computer bookmark ever have the same appeal as that bit of yellowing paper we come across in the attic? The YouTube cats are charming, but they will never produce the warm glow of the moment you turn over a fading KwikFit ad (wondering 'why did I keep this?') to discover that precious pantomime review on the other side.

Businesses cannot survive on sentimentality.. Circulations are falling, advertisers are turning away and a solely digital future seems to beckon.

Mainstream news organisations arrived late at the digital party and are still several drinks behind the crowd. They haven't caught up with the conversation, are unsure of the etiquette and frankly don't understand what a lot of their fellow guests are on about. Knocking back three or four shots in quick succession won't help. The others have been taking things at a steady - if brisk - pace. To try to catch up like this leaves the newcomers fuzzy-headed, confused and open to mockery.

So what are they to do? What do we want them to do? It costs money to run a news organisation: there are journalists to pay, offices to rent or buy, computer systems to set up and maintain, print contracts to finance. 

Yet we, the public, don't expect to pay for anything any more. We demand free music, free apps, free downloads, free films. 

We don't want the fag of driving to town and paying extortionate parking charges to buy something we can get online more cheaply. And we carry on cheapskating as we do our shopping in our sitting rooms, expecting 
free delivery and free returns - not to mention the 'no quibble' right to reject whatever we've bought for no better reason than that we've changed our minds. 

And so our high streets are dying and we all say 'oh what a shame' as though it had nothing to do with us. Just as we did when the village stores closed, forgetting that we went there only when we wanted a loaf or had run out of cat food on a Sunday when the 'proper' shops were shut.

Thus it is with news. We expect it to come free. We used to moan about papers being 'all adverts',  now we moan about subscriptions and paywalls, as though it costs nothing to produce something of quality and value. We pay for the BBC by the licence fee, but we don't pay for Google or AOL beyond our basic Broadband bill. We can look at the Guardian or the Mail websites without parting a penny and we gasped in horror when James Harding confirmed that The Times was building a paywall, explaining: 'We cannot afford to give our journalism away for nothing.'

And yet, and yet...the Mail Online is the most successful news website in the world. So it can be done. Is there a magic formula that would allow others (possibly following a rather different agenda) to keep going 'across all platforms' as the jargon has it?   

The answer lies with us. We, the readers, hold the fate of our newspapers in our hands, just as we, the shoppers, control the future of the high street.

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