Photojournalism

Question: Find a photojournalistic news story from any newspaper or magazine and answer the questions below.

Relatives mourn during the funeral of Itzik Amsalam, who was killed on Thursday after a rocket fired from Gaza landed in the southern town of Kiryat Malachi November 16, 2012. REUTERS/Nir Elias

Why did you choose this news over others?

This news is chosen because the picture captures my attention and has made an emotional impact on me. 

Journalistic photographs are evaluated by the impact they have on public opinion (Zelizer, 2005). There is a question being asked here; "If the conflict does not involve civilian, then do civilians die, and so many suffers?". This picture, with its rhetoric, may well have made Americans to empathize with the people of Gaza as well as made the public in general to question the reports in Israel regarding civilian casualties. 

Is the narrative component of the story necessary or is the picture enough to express the intended message of the news?

When I first encountered this photo, it was set in a context that does not require much more information to understand what the photograph tries to convey. I was searching for photojournalistic news stories through Google and came across the Reuters website and subsequently found this picture after going through Reuters' slideshow of photos, where around half of them are related to the turmoils of Gaza. When I saw this picture, I instantly recognize it was a coverage of the sufferings in that area. It is possible that this photo will be encountered in a setting where the reader is aware of the topic.

The narrative component of the story provides the exact setting of the event shown in the picture, that is, the date, who the people in the pictures are, and the exact reason for their grief. These details are difficult to be presented with photograph without manipulating it.

To answer the question, I would say it was not necessary to include the caption.

Did the picture and writings capture the "truth" of the event?

Although photographs are still viewed as realistic, there is a consensus that photographs do not directly replicate circumstances (Wells, 1997, p.25). The view of photography as a documentary  practice was prominent in the modernism but in the postmodernist era, the idea of photography providing depictions of things was given up.

One of the responsibilities of photojournalists is to avoid deceiving the public about how the images were made (Warburton, 1998, p. 131). I will adapt Kieran and Matthew's view on photojournalism:

         "Photojournalistic images have meaning in virtue of three interrelated aspects:

                       1. What they are of, in the sense of what cause them;

                       2. What they look to be of;

                       3. How they are used in a particular context."                  

                                                                                             (Warburton, 1998, p.145-146)

As I have no means to verify the photograph taken with the photographer with the three aspects, I will only explain what the these aspects mean based on my understanding.

The first one, "...in the sense of what cause them..." the act of . This photograph would not be truthful if "what seems to be documentary evidence, is really just an illustration of the event it purports to reveal" (Warburton, 1998, p.147). If, in reality, the picture shown above is of a family trying (but failing) to reassure each other for the success of a surgery done on their family member due to a car accident, at a hospital in England, it would be a deceptive photograph. It would be an illustration only and not a photojournalistic image.

The second one, "what they look to be of" is understood to be carrying the same meaning of the message they actually carries. If the reality of the event that this photograph capture is one of happiness and relief, to frame the shot into one of despair and grief would be untruthful, deceptive.

The third aspect is how the photograph is used in this context. Different conventions are used to read different context. Knowing it is a photograph in the website of a news agency, we would assumed it was there for the purpose of providing news. We would not try to read the picture as a joke, finding out what is funny, like how all the pictures we saw in the website 9GAG are being treated.

I cannot be sure if the photo is "truth"-ful but it has a big impact on my opinion of the news it is covering on. I would say that it is successful in conveying the "truth" it wants to tell.

References:

Warburton, N. (1998). Electrical photojournalism in the age of the electronic darkroom. In Kieran, M. (ed.), Media ethics. London: Routledge. 

Wells, L. (1997). Thinking about photography. Photography: a critical introduction (pp. 24-54) London: Routledge

Zelizer, B. (2005). Journalism through the camera’s eyes. In Allan, S. (ed.), Journalism: Critical issues (pp. 167-176). Berkshire: Open University Press.