SWVC Images and Blog

I met Henri Joost again this week in Melbourne at a conference. The last time I met him was shortly after he had been in the Christchurch Earthquake. He subsequently produced an account of walking through the streets shortly after the quake where I think that he felt like a dissociated observer. I (with his permission) published his account on FB including some photos that he took on his iPhone.

Meeting him again started me thinking about photography, and the fact that photography now encompasses many different facets. He was, I guess, practising photojournalism – what you might call ‘amateur photojournalism’ [help me out here, suggest a better term]. Nowadays, almost anyone has a means of taking a photograph, and not infrequently these snatched amateur images are the ones that are disseminated most widely. The immediacy of many of these photographs can be striking.

The difference is now that anyone can take them. The defining images of the Vietnam war and Tienanmen Square were taken by professional photographers, while the recent pictures from the Middle East were snatched by individuals who were there with their mobile phone (or their handy-cam).

Of course the ultimate defintion of ‘professional photographer’ is someone who earns their living from photography. However, it seems to me that many professional photographers are now retreating into the technical aspects of photography – many have of course lived in the studio exclusively for years. Even Joe McNally travels with bags and bags of kit. He produces fantastic images that are lit beautifully.. They are perhaps all the more striking because they have an element of artificiality and that draws the eye to aspects of the image that we would not otherwise perceive. (Don’t get me wrong – I would chop off bits of myself to be able to take photos as well as he does while deprecatingly referring to himself as ‘numb nuts’)

One of the proponents of moving away from the studio is David Hobby. Interestingly, a recent blog – produced after I had started musing – reflects on his days as a press photographer. He says “being a newspaper shooter brought with it a strict code of ethics, writ holy by the Nation Press Photographer’s Association. Simply put, we were not supposed to alter the situations we were covering.” He then lists a number of ways of manipulating the subject or their environment to improve the image…

Most of my photos are not staged or planned. They represent what I saw and pointed the camera at and until fairly recently they were taken with a film camera (I resisted changing to digital until quite late in the day). The only caveat is that since most of the images have been subsequently scanned, they have often been manipulated in Lightroom or Photoshop to some extent. I now have to confess to spending happy hours fiddling in Lightroom (mainly) so I cannot wear the cloak of pure photography too closely. And I wish I had invented HDR.