What is the Rule of Thirds?
The rule of thirds describes a basic compositional structure of a photograph. Taking any image, you can split it into 9 segments by using 3 vertical and 3 horizontal lines. The “point of interest” is at the area two of the lines intersect.
Using the Triangle as a compostion tool
1.The triangle allows the viewer's eye to move over the flat surface.
2. At the same time, the triangle helps stabilize the image.
3. Triangles exist everywhere, but you must search to put them in your photo.
New Delhi, India
Family members mourn a victim of Covid-19 before burial.Medium Shot
Elizabeth City, US
Demonstrators fly a flag on the eighth day of protests after the fatal shooting of a Black man, Andrew Brown, by North Carolina deputies.Photograph: Robert Willett/AP
medium shot
medium shot
Washington, US
The US president, Joe Biden, addresses a joint session of Congress as the vice-president, Kamala Harris, left, and house speaker, Nancy Pelosi, look on.Photograph: Jim Watson/AP
New York, US
Participants in a Black Lives Lost to Gun Violence vigil in Brooklyn.Photograph: Eduardo Muñoz/Reuters
establishing shot
Background information on Photojournalism
Learning targets:
I can respond thoughtfully to diverse perspectives; synthesize comments, claims, and evidence made on all sides of an issue;
I can propel conversations by posing and responding to questions that probe reasoning and evidence.
I can integrate multiple sources of information presented in diverse formats and media .
I can present information, findings, and supporting evidence, conveying a clear and distinct perspective.
I can analyze nuances in the meaning of words (images) with similar denotations.
I can make strategic use of digital media (e.g., textual, graphical, audio, visual, and interactive elements) in presentations to enhance understanding of findings, reasoning, and evidence and to add interest.
I can adapt speech to a variety of contexts and tasks.
To begin the photojournalism unit, please read the following general information, and the subsequent brief history of photojournalism.
In order to ensure that the reading has been completed, please respond to the questions that follow. You should be able to copy and paste the responses. Please send along as usual. This is due by midnight Friday.
Photojournalism background information questions
Part 1
Photojournalism background information questions
1. What was the original purpose of photojournalism and how has it changed. (please weave text into your response.)
2. What is the difference between photojournalism and documentary photography?
3. How did the Leica change photography?
4. How did the photo magazines differ from individual news photos?
5. What was the function of the cutlines?
6. Who was Henry Luce?
7. How has photojournalism served political or social issues?
8. What was the impact of television on photojournalism?
9. In what was is photography "another design tool?"
10. What role does photojournalism play now?
11. At the end of the blog, you'll find excerpts from Life Magazine's first photojournalism issue of 1936. Read the short introductory material, and write a five-seven sentence response as to what was expected of Bourke-White and what she actually photographed. What do you think was the impact of her choice?
PART 2: After having responded to the general background information on photojournalism, read the material that comes after the images of the first photojournalism shoot to be published in Life magazine. It is entitled "Debating the Rules and Ethics of Digital Photojournalism."
Read carefully and then weigh in with approximately 150 words. Consider one or two of points made. Weave in text, please. This is your opinion.
by Ed Kashi
Photojournalism is a unique and powerful form of visual storytelling originally created for print magazines and newspapers but has now morphed into multimedia and even documentary film making. Through the internet, apps and the mobile device explosion, photojournalism can now reach audiences never before imagined with immediate impact, while continuing to write our visual history and form our collective memories.
Photojournalism works on multiple levels, from covering breaking news and wars, to forming visual narratives and feature stories that help to illuminate and clarify the issues of our time with a depth and perspective that few other mediums can achieve. The universal nature of photography and the ability to capture time and freeze it in a way the mind remembers is a searing and unique quality of this medium.
Photojournalism can also work as an agent of change, often outside of its role in mainstream media. This tradition harks back to its earliest days and confirms its roots in advocacy and the documentary tradition. When practiced as long form, in depth, personal storytelling, photojournalism expands the aesthetics of visual reporting, justifies its grand intentions of enlightenment and contributes to our deeper understanding of the world.
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More info.
Photojournalism is a branch of journalism characterized by the use of images to tell a story. The images in a piece may be accompanied by explanatory text or shown independently, with the images themselves narrating the events they depict. Photojournalists can be found working all over the world, from the halls of the White House to the steppes of Asia, and they deal with a broad assortment of situations on a daily basis. Many major newspapers have photojournalists on staff, and others rely on photographs included in a press pool by freelance photojournalists.
People have been using images to depict events for centuries, from rock paintings to engravings in major newspapers. The first big event to be captured in photography was the Crimean War, establishing the groundwork for the professional field. Initially, photographs were often used to accompany text stories to provide some variation and visual interest, but over time, images began to be used more exclusively to narrate stories in the media.
The field is distinct from that of documentary photography. Although both involve taking photographs which are objective, honest, and informative, photojournalism involves photographing specific events, while documentary photography focuses on ongoing situations. A photographer who follows traditional farmers in rural England is a documentary photographer, but one who takes pictures of the aftermath of a suicide bombing for publication in the news is a photojournalist.
Modern photojournalism: 1920-1990.
excerpts from from Ross Collins, professor North Dakota State University, advanced News Photography Course
1925 Leica
The beginning of modern photojournalism took place in 1925, in Germany. The event was the invention of the first 35 mm camera, the Leica. It was designed as a way to use surplus movie film, then shot in the 35 mm format. Before this, a photo of professional quality required bulky equipment; after this photographers could go just about anywhere and take photos unobtrusively, without bulky lights or tripods. The difference was dramatic, for primarily posed photos, with people award of the photographer's presence, to new, natural photos of people as they really lived.
Added to this was another invention originally from Germany, the photojournalism magazine. From the mid-1920s, Germany, at first, experimented with the combination of two old ideas. Old was the direct publication of photos; that was available after about 1890, and by the early 20th century, some publications, newspaper-style and magazine, were devoted primarily to illustrations. But the difference of photo magazines beginning in the 1920s was the collaboration--instead of isolated photos, laid out like in your photo album, editors and photographers begin to work together to produce an actual story told by pictures and words, or cutlines. In this concept, photographers would shoot many more photos than they needed, and transfer them to editors. Editors would examine contact sheets, that is, sheets with all the photos on them in miniature form (now done using Photoshop software), and choose those he or she best believed told the story. As important in the new photojournalism style was the layout and writing. Cutlines, or captions, helped tell the story along with the photos, guiding the reader through the illustrations, and photos were no longer published like a family album, or individually, just to illustrate a story. The written story was kept to a minimum, and the one, dominant, theme-setting photo would be published larger, while others would help reinforce this theme.
The combination of photography and journalism, or photojournalism--a term coined by Frank Luther Mott, historian and dean of the University of Missouri School of Journalism--really became familiar after World War II (1939-1945). Germany's photo magazines established the concept, but Hitler's rise to power in 1933 led to suppression and persecution of most of the editors, who generally fled the country. Many came to the United States.
The time was ripe, of course, for the establishment of a similar style of photo reporting in the U.S. Henry Luce, already successful with Time and Fortune magazines, conceived of a new general-interest magazine relying on modern photojournalism. It was called Life, launched Nov. 23, 1936.
The first photojournalism cover story was an article about the building of the Fort Peck Dam in Montana. Margaret Bourke-White photographed this, and in particular chronicled the life of the workers in little shanty towns spring up around the building site. The Life editor in charge of photography, John Shaw Billings, saw the potential of these photos, showing a kind of frontier life of the American West that many Americans thought had long vanished. Life, published weekly, immediately became popular, and was emulated by look-alikes such as Look, See, Photo, Picture, Click, and so on. Only Look and Life lasted. Look went out of business in 1972; Life suspended publication the same year, returned in 1978 as a monthly, and finally folded as a serial in 2001.
But in the World War II era, Life was probably the most influential photojournalism magazine in the world. During that war, the most dramatic pictures of the conflict came not so often from the newspapers as from the weekly photojournalism magazines, photos that still are famous today. The drama of war and violence could be captured on those small, fast 35 mm cameras like no other, although it had to be said that through the 1950s and even 1960s, not all photojournalists used 35s. Many used large hand-held cameras made by the Graflex Camera Company, and two have become legendary: the Speed Graphic, and later, Crown Graphic. These are the cameras you think of when you see old movies of photographers crowding around some celebrity, usually showing the photographer smoking a cigar and wearing a "Press" card in the hatband of his fedora. These cameras used sheet film, which meant you had to slide a holder in the back of the camera after every exposure. They also had cumbersome bellows-style focusing, and a pretty crude rangefinder. Their advantage, however, was their superb quality negative, which meant a photographer could be pretty sloppy about exposure and development and still dredge up a reasonable print. (Automatic-exposure and focus cameras did not become common until the 1980s.)
Rolleifex
Successor to the Graphic by the 1950s was the 120-format camera, usually a Rolleiflex, which provided greater mobility at the expense of smaller negative size. You looked down into the ground-glass viewfinder. But in newspapers, by the Vietnam War era, the camera of choice was the 35--film got better, making the camera easier to use, and the ability to use telephone, wide-angle, and later, zoom lenses made the 35 indispensable, as it still is to most photojournalists today.
35 mm
Some of the great photojournalists of the early picture story era included "Weegee" (Arthur Fellig), a cigar-chomping cameraman before World War II who chronicled the New York crime and society's underside.
During World War II W. Eugene Smith and Robert Capa became well known for their gripping war pictures. Both were to be gravely affected by their profession. In fact, Capa was killed on assignment in Indochina, and Smith was severely injured on assignment in Japan.
Debating the Rules and Ethics
Once we saw the evidence, we were shocked. Many of the images we had to disqualify were pictures we all believed in and which we all might have published. But to blatantly add, move around or remove elements of a picture concerns us all, leaving many in the jury to feel we were being cheated, that they were being lied to. Some were disqualified for sloppy Photoshop manipulation. However, a large number were rejected for removing or adding information to the image, for example, like toning that rendered some parts so black that entire objects disappeared from the frame. The jury — which was flexible about toning, given industry standards — could not accept processing that blatantly added or removed elements of the picture. When the entries were compared with the originals we could not recognize them as being the same picture.
But again: we must realize that most participants do understand the rules and the limitations.In preliminary evaluations during our judging period, we have discussed how to improve the ways we use to explain the rules on manipulation. We are now thinking about setting up a series of video tutorials that show participating photographers what kinds of manipulation are not allowed. They will make clear that manipulation — the addition or removal of significant content, other than sensor anomalies — is not allowed, regardless of the technical process through which that addition or removal is achieved. We think that a visual explanation might work better than a text-only explanation.
Shortly before the war, with the world realizing the power of the camera to tell a story when used in unopposed, candid situations, the federal government's Farm Security Administration hired a group of photographers. In fact, the FSC was set up in 1935 by Franklin D. Roosevelt to help resettle farmers who were destitute due to the Depression and massive drought in the Midwest. Because these resettlements might be a controversial task, the director, Roy Stryker, hired a number of photographers to record the plight of the farmers in the Midwest.
The photographers later, many of them, became famous--the collected 150,000 photos now housed in the Library of Congress. The power of these often stark, even ugly images showed America the incredible imbalance of its society, between urban prosperity and rural poverty, and helped convince people of the importance of Roosevelt's sometimes controversial social welfare programs. You can still buy copies of all these photos from the Library of Congress, including the most famous, such as Arthur Rothstein's dust bowl photo, or Dorthea Lange's "Migrant Mother."
The golden age of photojournalism, with its prominent photo-story pages, ranged from about 1935 to 1975. Television clearly had a huge impact--to be able to see things live was even more powerful than a photo on paper. Even so, many of the photos we remember so well, the ones that symbolized a time and a place in our world, often were moments captured by still photography. Early in photojournalism black and white was still the standard, and newspapers and many magazines were still publishing many photo-pages with minimal copy, stories told through photographs. Beginning about in the mid-1980s, however, photojournalism changed its approach. Photographs standing alone, with bare cutlines, carrying the story themselves often have been dropped in favor of more artistic solutions to story-telling: using photography as part of an overall design, along with drawings, headlines, graphics, other tools. It seems photography has fallen often into the realm of just another design tool.
Photography is driven by technology, always has been. Because, more than any other visual art, photography is built around machines and, at least until recently, chemistry. By the 1990s photojournalists were already shooting mostly color, and seldom making actual prints, but use computer technology to scan film directly into the design. And by the beginning of the new millennium, photojournalists were no longer using film: digital photography had become universal, both faster and cheaper in an industry preoccupied with both speed and profit. If you compare published photography today to that to 25 years ago, many fewer candid photos, less spontaneity, fewer feature photos of people grabbed at work or doing something outside.
Margaret Bourke-White
LIFE's First-Ever Cover Story: Building the Fort Peck Dam, 1936
Photographer Margaret Bourke-White had been dispatched to the Northwest to photograph the multimillion dollar projects of the Columbia River Basin. What the editors expected were construction pictures as only Bourke-White can take them. What the editors got was a human document of American frontier life which, to them at least, was a revelation."
Thus the men and women behind what would become one of the longest-lived experiments — and one of the greatest success stories — of 20th century American publishing introduced themselves, and their inaugural effort, to the world.
In her riveting 1963 autobiography, Portrait of Myself, Bourke-White herself recalls the heady experience working for LIFE — on the debut issue, and on countless subsequent assignments for what would become one of the indispensable weeklies of the past 100 years:
Workers on Montana's Fort Peck Dam blow off steam at night, 1936.
Margaret Bourke-White—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Image
Margaret Bourke-White—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Image
Caption from LIFE. In the Wild West town of Wheeler, near Fort Peck, Montana, Frank Breznik (left) is the law.
This is Wheeler, Montana, one of the six frontier towns around Fort Peck in Mr. Roosevelt's new Wild West
The New West's new hotspot is a town called 'New Deal.'
The only idle bedsprings in New Deal are the broken ones.
Beneath a "No Beer Sold to Indians" sign, a woman tosses back a drink in Montana, 1936.
Life in the cowless cow towns is lush but not cheap.
Bar X, Montana, 1936
Ruby's Place. This is the beer bar. The only drink you can legally sell by the glass in Montana
One-fourth of the Missouri River will run through this steel 'liner.'
cene from one of the several "frontier towns" near the site of the Fort Peck Dam, Montana
Workers on the site of the Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936.
The mammoth pipes to be used to divert the flow of the Missouri River, during building
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Debating the Rules and Ethics
of Digital Photojournalism
Hoping to forge a conversation on what happened and how the photojournalism community might move forward, Lens has asked several participants in the World Press Photo competition, as well as other photographers, to reflect on these issues.
Michele McNally, jury chairwoman, 2015 World Press Photo contest
Many of us have been thinking for a while about how we still refer to traditional darkroom techniques as providing suitable guidelines for what’s acceptable in digital image processing. But as we learned last week, digital is not film, it is data — and it requires a new and clear set of rules.
That became painfully clear to the jury when 20 percent of the photographers entering the penultimate round — where images are considered for the top three awards — were disqualified after technicians compared the entries against the unprocessed RAW files.
Once we saw the evidence, we were shocked. Many of the images we had to disqualify were pictures we all believed in and which we all might have published. But to blatantly add, move around or remove elements of a picture concerns us all, leaving many in the jury to feel we were being cheated, that they were being lied to. Some were disqualified for sloppy Photoshop manipulation. However, a large number were rejected for removing or adding information to the image, for example, like toning that rendered some parts so black that entire objects disappeared from the frame. The jury — which was flexible about toning, given industry standards — could not accept processing that blatantly added or removed elements of the picture. When the entries were compared with the originals we could not recognize them as being the same picture.
Many of these photographers clearly didn’t think what they were doing was wrong. But I’m telling you that it was often very wrong and not accidental. For now, it is hard to know what’s comprised and what’s not.
World Press Photo needs to be more exact about its rules, and they know it. But the industry needs to be more exact, too, about what is — and isn’t — acceptable. We have to do something, but I don’t know yet what that is. Do we check every single picture’s RAW file before it goes out? Is that even possible? But we all have to take action, because right now, the situation is heartbreaking.
As a Pictures of the Year international judge this year, we had some serious conversations about the toning of images — both in terms of ones that were overtoned and undertoned. Unlike World Press, POYi winners do not have to submit a RAW file for verification. But I know that if there are any concerns with the images in POYi as they’re being submitted, sorted and checked, contest coordinators can request an original image file at that time. As a judge, I trusted that if anything was egregious, it had been caught on the front end, rather than the back.
“It’s a dangerous and slippery slope to travel down when altered work is lauded.”
Learning that World Press Photo had to disqualify 20 percent of the images in the penultimate round because the judges found the image content had been altered is incredibly disheartening. The fact that some photojournalists think any degree of lying and manipulation is O.K., makes me question the message they’re sending to others — as well as the ego they’re stroking and the impossible level of perfection they’re striving for in their own work.
It’s a dangerous and slippery slope to travel down when altered work is lauded, and other photojournalists see that as the ideal. It sets a bar that is unreal, unhealthy, and unattainable. And what does it say that we as viewers, editors and judges value these images in the first place? Are we preprogrammed to be drawn to things that really are too good to be true?
It also reminds me of something I was told as a kid: lying is easy, telling the truth is the hard part. If we, as journalists, can’t be trusted to tell the truth in our reporting, the entire foundation of our profession is going to crumble underneath our feet.
Contests are a necessary evil. Freelancers need contests for visibility and marketing, to keep alive in the editorial rat race. We are pressured to do more and push the envelope — not so much for our vision but for our business model.
World Press has some pretty straightforward rules by which we all abide, but since the advent of digital files — of RAW and the ease of Photoshop — the rules have blurred. Some things should be standard, like don’t make stuff up. Don’t pose photojournalism.
Cloning isn’t acceptable. Taking something out of the soda can while leaving the background clean is not cool. But neither is cropping. That is — for all intentions — the same thing, ethically. And on that level — why is it O.K. to use flash and basically bring a portable sun? That is not “real” light.
A RAW file contains much more information than a negative. A photographer can expose for highlights to make completely black dense shadows and there is still information in the RAW. So is the truth of our images now more about intent when shooting? Intent must be considered. But what do we do? Hire an assistant to follow us around with another camera so we can be recorded saying “I’m trying the make this image super contrasty!”
The world is used to filters and manipulation for the sake of aesthetics. How do we as visual communicators adapt? I believe that many of us adopted certain techniques, not to change the truth of what we were attempting to articulate, but to make our images stand out from the crowd. As photojournalists or documentarians we aim to highlight life and tell stories, but we are all do it in our own way. Each of us is a product of our own experiences in life and those experiences determine our motivation behind each click of the shutter.
“Cloning isn’t acceptable. Taking something out of the soda can while leaving the background clean is not cool. But neither is cropping.”
— PhotographerWhat is truth? Photography certainly isn’t. Photography is artifice. We can underexpose and overexpose the same image, neither version is “true” or “untrue” — it is just a different interpretation of the world in front of us.
When I was notified that I was disqualified last year I was shocked and embarrassed. But then I realized that I didn’t do anything different than I ever did. They said my shadows were too deep and they believed I darkened my shadows too much. They asked for my RAW file this year and my entry this year was not disqualified, as far as I know, even though it was processed in the exact same way.
To be honest, I don’t think I broke the rules. In the end it’s all in the hands of the judges and their sensitivities and proclivities.
We live in a world where there is a ton of image manipulation — if 20 percent of the highest level of photographers are doing it — maybe we need to examine what they are doing and come to accept that as a growth of photography.
As of 2015 all participants are required to provide files as recorded by the camera for all images that proceed to the contest’s final stages. The photographers were cooperative and were willing to send us the RAW files, which shows us that they understood the rules. Every photographer who enters the competition can read the rules on our website. They were again informed in November when we posted a F.A.Q. on our website, where we also published the report on manipulation.
There is no indication that the rules are unclear to the participating photographers. When they have questions during the period they submit the work, a team is available to answer these questions. We have not experienced any difficulty with photographers understanding these rules. They act in accordance with the guidelines of professional conduct.
But again: we must realize that most participants do understand the rules and the limitations.In preliminary evaluations during our judging period, we have discussed how to improve the ways we use to explain the rules on manipulation. We are now thinking about setting up a series of video tutorials that show participating photographers what kinds of manipulation are not allowed. They will make clear that manipulation — the addition or removal of significant content, other than sensor anomalies — is not allowed, regardless of the technical process through which that addition or removal is achieved. We think that a visual explanation might work better than a text-only explanation.
During 2015 we will be hosting further debate on the issue of manipulation.
If further debate makes clear the community has changed its ideas on the issue of manipulation, World Press Photo will discuss the possible need to adapt the rules. However, we will not change the basic rule that prohibits removing or adding material to the picture. We think that is the foundation of basic journalistic values needed to present credible photographic documents and visual evidence.
The World Press Photo research project on “The Integrity of the Image” was commissioned in order to assess what the current worldwide practices and accepted standards relating to the manipulation of still images in photojournalism and documentary photography. As an independent consultant, and following specific terms of reference set by World Press Photo, I conducted a survey of 45 industry professionals from 15 countries that examined standards for the processing of images.
The question of possible manipulation is far from exhausted by the focus on processing. At almost every stage in photographic practice from image capture to circulation there is the potential for manipulation. The mere fact of going to place A rather than place B to produce an image involves a choice that might represent reality in a partial manner. How travel to a photographic location was enabled and funded raises a series of questions. Once on location, the composition and framing of scenes necessarily involves choices that limit representations. Some may set scenes up. The editing, selection, and captioning of images for potential publication adds more layers of decision, and so on.
The study’s principal finding is that a de facto global consensus exists on how media organizations understand manipulation of images. Manipulation is regarded as involving material changes in the processing of an image through the addition or subtraction of content, and it is always deemed unacceptable for news and documentary pictures, as well as nature and sports. The only exception is the removal of tiny details caused by sensor anomalies like dust.
“Manipulation for the juries was not about there being ‘too much Photoshop.’ Manipulation is not synonymous with processing.”
— David Campbell
Adjustments to photographs (such as limited cropping, dodging and burning, toning, color adjustment, conversion to grayscale) are accepted, and they are usually described in terms of “minor” changes being permitted while “excessive” changes are prohibited. What counts as “minor” versus “excessive” changes are necessarily interpretive with respondents saying they are judged on a case-by-case basis, suggesting, even if it was technically possible, there will never be a clear line demarcating these concepts. It is because of this there is, and always will be, much debate about the toning of pictures.
The contest rules state “the content of an image must not be altered. Only retouching that conforms to currently-accepted standards in the industry is allowed. The jury is the ultimate arbiter of these standards.”
Manipulation for the juries was not about there being “too much Photoshop.” Manipulation is not synonymous with processing. Jurors may have liked or disliked certain levels of toning, but that was just one factor to consider in their overall assessment of images. All images are processed, and levels of processing are aesthetic judgments and do not by themselves violate contest rules. The only point at which processing becomes manipulation is when the toning is so great — usually by transforming significant parts of an image to opaque black or white — that it obscures substantial detail.
Over all, photography should have no limits on creativity, and overtly constructed imagery has much to say about our world. But for those reportage images we want to be documents and evidence, clear standards are necessary to underwrite their credibility. Photographers like Narciso Contreras and Miguel Tova have lost their jobs because of manipulations that crossed the one line we can draw. Of course, that line has to be constantly examined and possibly refined. But we don’t want the first question for every news image to be whether it is faked or not. The best way to guard against that is to be vigilant against all material changes in this realm.
I feel sad that our profession has been tainted by award hunters who use lies to get recognition, but in reality are jeopardizing the essence of photojournalism. The disqualified photographers are not only cheating the jury, the public and their colleagues: they are also cheating themselves. Some of them do not need to doctor their images to win, so it is very shocking to see what they did.
The greatest athletes have been caught cheating using drugs, and I see no reason strict rules shouldn’t apply to our profession.
Manipulation isn’t new in photojournalism; it dates back to the birth of photography. Then it needed real lab technicians, but nowadays it only requires few mouse clicks.
The World Press Photo contest has clear rules on the matter. The disqualified pictures did not meet the rules. I believe World Press Photo needs to be more transparent and explain why the images we are talking about have been disqualified. I call on the management of World Press Photo to show the public what happened and give the reasons those photographers were disqualified. It’s the only way for the public and the photographers to understand.
“I feel sad that our profession has been tainted by award hunters who use lies to get recognition, but in reality are jeopardizing the essence of photojournalism.”
I highly recommend that photojournalists all over the world download and carefully read “The Integrity of the Image,” by David Campbell. This document should be the basis of a Ten Commandments for our industry. Photography is a very subjective art, but in photojournalism there is also journalism and that part must be predominant. We need to draw a line, otherwise we leave the door open to abusers.
