The News: A User's Manual

Photography

A generic President Barack Obama (Getty Images).

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1.

THERE IS NO more oppressed or put-upon figure in the newsrooms of the modern world than the photo editor. Responsible for coordinating the visual aspect of news output, the men and women who fill this position almost always repeat (out of earshot of their bosses) the identical complaint: ‘No one believes in photography any more.’

This is not to say that no photographs are employed to illustrate the news; far from it. There are now more images than ever before embedded in the coverage we consume. The problem lies in the lack of ambition behind their production and display. Photographs are still used, but the arguments for taking, identifying and then paying for the best examples appear to have been forgotten. A great majority of the pictures that do make it into print are compressed, bland, repetitive, clichéd and sidelined, and are seen, unsurprisingly, as nothing more than blocks of colour that can break up monochromatic runs of text.

We might usefully divide news photographs into two genres. The first are images of corroboration, which do little other than confirm something we have learned about a person or an event through an accompanying article. So if a story informs us that the president gave a speech, a photograph will appear to one side verifying just this. The idea here is that photography should just furnish an extra level of proof as to the reality of events which have already been described in language.

Then there is another, rarer kind of image, the photograph of revelation, whose ambition is not simply to back up what the text tells us but to advance our level of knowledge to a new point. It sets out to challenge cliché.

Anonymous, Portrait of Henri IV, 17th century.

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Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Henri IV Receiving the Ambassador of Spain, 1817.

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If photo editors can seem a little defeated, it is because they have daily to confront the fact that the photographs demanded and paid for by their industry almost always fall into the first, cheaper and less useful of these two categories.

2.

A SIMILAR DICHOTOMY between images that corroborate and ones that reveal can be found in the fine arts, and particularly in portraiture and history paintings. We might compare, for instance, two rather different pictures of Henri IV, king of France. In the first, by an unknown seventeenth-century painter, the monarch looks kindly, stiff and opaque. We can take it on faith that this is a fair enough likeness, but the portrait does little to enhance our knowledge of the king’s nature. Contrast this with an early-nineteenth-century painting by Ingres in which Henri is shown sprawled on the floor with his children, pretending to be a horse or perhaps a donkey. On the left side of the canvas, the Spanish ambassador has just arrived to see him, but the king is asking for a few minutes more to finish his game. Ingres’s image goes beyond just confirming that Henri existed and that he had a beard: it invites us to consider a statesman’s soul.

3.

EVERY GREAT NEWS image should likewise enrich our otherwise deficient and prejudiced pictures of reality.

Stephanie Sinclair, Tahani and Ghada, Yemen, 2010.

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For example, I thought I knew about child marriages, but until I saw a photograph taken by Stephanie Sinclair, I had never realized that the young brides involved aren’t really children. Marriage swiftly turns them into diminutive old ladies, with expressions at once resigned, solemn, betrayed and infinitely sad. In tandem, their husbands are not the mature brutes I imagined them to be. They look guileless, innocent and confused, seemingly still children themselves. It is almost beyond imagining that these poignant, absurd, cursed pairs of spouses could even begin to offer each other comfort.

Manu Brabo, A Syrian Man Cries While Holding the Body of His Son, Killed by the Syrian Army, near Dar El Shifa Hospital in Aleppo, Syria, 2012.

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I thought I knew that war wasn’t generally a good idea and that innocents sometimes got killed in crossfire, but I didn’t realize quite how much I also believed in every attempt at diplomacy and quite how much I wouldn’t mind if some rather important strategic interests were lost so long as war could be avoided – and fathers didn’t have to mourn their blood-soaked sons.

Stuart Franklin, Streetlife, Kinshasa, 2004.

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I thought I knew about the world, but I realize now that despite the countless photos I have seen and the many publications I have read, I retain barely a single image in my imagination of most countries around our planet. I struggle to summon up any visual associations whatsoever with Chile or Peru, I have no clue what Burundi or Niger looks like, I can’t picture Burkina Faso or the Solomon Islands – and so I am fascinated by a photograph that at least teaches me that in Kinshasa shops sell household goods, people speak French (‘Vente des Appareils Electroménager’) and young men, whatever troubles they may have seen, still know something about laughter and play.

Pete Souza, President Barack Obama Pretends to Be Caught in Spider-Man’s Web as He Greets the Son of a White House Staffer in the Outer Oval Office, 2012.

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I thought I knew about President Obama, too, because I have seen him in a great many photographs giving speeches against the backdrop of the presidential eagle. I knew that he was capable of faking certain things to get elected, but I didn’t realize that he could also, in his better moments, fake a thing or two to please a child. I therefore stare for a long time at an image taken by the White House staff photographer, Pete Souza, thinking that Obama, like his counterpart Henri IV four centuries back, may be at his most touchingly powerful precisely when he lets himself be the playmate of a child.

4.

AS READERS OF news stories, we have seen so many bad photographs that it is unlikely even to occur to us that it might be rewarding occasionally to stop and look properly at a few of their good counterparts. It would seem bizarre to interrupt the reading of an article in order to contemplate an accompanying image for as long as we might study a painting in a museum – say, thirty seconds or more – and with an expectation of learning something distinctive. We have lost any sense of photography’s potential as an information-bearing medium, as a force with a crucial job to do in terms of properly introducing us to a planet that we keep conceitedly and recklessly assuming that we know rather well already.