Is photojournalism dead?

Photograph is a powerful tool that able to let people to convey messages through it. According to Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006), images and texts need to be combining together in order to let audiences to convey the messages. Everyone interpret differently and tend to fill in the gaps based on their cultural background and experiences (Walsh 2006). Photographs used to catch the audiences’ attentions and lead them to the story (Kraus 2009). Photojournalism refers to photographs and texts cooperate to convey information about events (About.com n.d.) Based on Watt (2007), he states that photojournalism is telling the story by showing both images and texts.

Is photojournalism dead or is it a change in the perception? Kraus (2009) claimed that photojournalism is dead due to people nowadays does not care about the appropriate and meaningful photography. Moreover, he declared that those who do not work as the journalist before such as owners, editors and publishers runs the media killed photojournalism as photography is no longer important. No one will concern about the quality of photographs and news relevance anymore as the media only concern about the coverage (Kraus 2009). The media will publish any photographs that they have and do not care about the quality.

In addition, there are also evidences show that photojournalism jobs are fewer due to the decline of print media and the increase of citizen photojournalism and free digital media (Taylor n.d.). Taylor (n.d.) stated that the newspaper and magazine publishers tend to redefine the meaning of freelance photojournalism and it results to less pay for increased rights. Kraus (2009) also claimed that there are no time for relevance and no money for quality which caused photojournalism these days are dead. Whilst Cartwright (n.d.) affirmed that as time goes by, audiences tend to view visually which caused photojournalists become the interpreters. Hence, I believe that in certain situation, photojournalism is still alive as people can understand the situation such as natural disaster. Photojournalism may be misconstrued in certain situation such as political because images are too polysemous and too open to a variety of possible meanings (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006).

References:

Answer.com n.d., Photojournalism, viewed 12 June 2010, http://www.answers.com/topic/photojournalism.

Cartwright n.d., Photojournalism, viewed 12 June 2010, http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/articles/pages/1054/Photojournalism.html.

Kraus 2009, The Digital Journalist, Rest in Peace: Photojournalism is Dead, viewed 12 June 2010, http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0912/rest-in-peace-photojournalism-is-dead.html.

Kress, G. & van Leeuwen 2006, Reading Images: Grammar of Visual Design, Routledge, London.

Walsh, M. 2006, 'Textual shift: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts", Australian Journal of Language.

Watt 2007, ABC.net.au, Portraiture and photojournalism: Chris Beck, viewed 12 June 2010, http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2007/06/15/1952583.htm?site=melbourne.