50 years of photojournalism

Today I got my pretentious on again. I pulled out the black beret and dusted off the old polo neck and headed in to Tokyo’s Metropolitan Museum of Photography.
I was really excited to see the above exhibition entitled ‘Images as they are: five decades of iconic photo-journalism.’
It really brought home how much power a well taken and well-timed photo can hold. And iconic was no understatement. They were very, very famous works, but thoroughly depressing. It was like condensing fifty years of human misery into one exhibition.
After seeing slow motion footage of Kennedy getting shot, innumerable images of wars and public strife, pictures of the first people to be diagnosed with aids and small famine stricken hands clutching at an aid worker’s fingers, I was about ready to give it all up.
I totally understand that this was not art, but photojournalism. So it was natural that worldwide trouble and strife should be disproportionately represented. It hasn’t exactly been a peaceful nor uneventful half-century. Plus they really were trying to drive home the message that such images are not gratuitous but can, in themselves, be agents for change and improvement. Maybe so, but man I really needed a hug by the end.
Another very interesting theme they were trying to get across was to show that as technology has developed, so too has the style of photojournalism. It’s been democratised, as it were. In only the last decade, with the arrival of digital technology, the age of the amateur photojournalist, the on-the-scene witness has been born.
But I’m not convinced that proximity necessarily equals truth. Just being there and recording an event does not necessarily have the same impact as the image a talented and professional eye can create. Such images tell a richer story.
I was far more moved and provoked by the truth of the Vietnamese woman washing blood from her doorstep or the Biafran militia carrying mortar shells like a bunch of bananas, than by the point and push of the Asian Tsunami, 9/11 or Abu Ghraib. Something for the CNN’s or Fox News’s of this world to think about.