This isn’t at all what I had planned on posting today. We shot a series of photos back in August/early September that I had planned on releasing today but I am still not done with all the editing. This is a pretty time-intensive project and very little margin for error. Somethings are best not rushed so we’re waiting a week or two. Please accept my apologies for that.
I didn’t want to let another Sunday pass without posting something though, so I went back and picked up some images from the early days of digital photography. This was back in 2003-2005 when it was still a challenge to convince some people that digital photography was viable. A lot of people looked at me like I was crazy back then. Most magazines wouldn’t even look at digital submissions. The cameras produced images that were a whopping three and five megapixels deep and cropping was something one wanted to avoid at all cost.
Most of the pictures we took back then have been lost for various reasons and even among those I still have there are several I wouldn’t share publicly. The noise content was much too high. Low-light sensitivity was practically non-existent. Managing contrast was difficult. We tried a lot of different “tricks” and the majority of them didn’t work well.
Still, there are a few from back then that I don’t mind sharing. I actually have a couple hanging on my living room wall. Learning to shoot digitally wasn’t completely like starting all over but there was a serious learning curve and the quality of the pictures is a testament to that.
The announcement this past week that Sony is releasing its new a7RIII in November has me drooling at the advanced features and very anxious to get my hands one (If anyone at Sony is watching, I’ll happily take a demo). When I do, though, there’s going to be another learning curve. Bruce Dorn was right, video is where the future of photography lies and as much as I’ve balked at it the time has probably come to jump in and start learning. That means there’s going to be another round of images that, ten years from now, make me shudder a bit. Everything is cyclical.
For today, here’s a selection of older images. If you’ve been around a while you might have seen some of them. As always, click on a thumbnail to view the full-size gallery. Enjoy.
[tg_masonry_gallery gallery_id=”11598″ layout=”contain” columns=”4″]
Taking Pictures That Offend
Almost everyone has taken a photo they wished later hadn’t happened. Maybe it was on a drunken spree with friends, or a vacation where it didn’t seem to matter. Perhaps you were caught making a funny face as you sneezed. There are a lot of embarrassing pictures floating around all over the Internet. We tend to laugh at them and move on.
Other pictures might have seemed okay when they were taken but didn’t age well. For example, those intimate pictures of you and your spouse felt loving and romantic when you took them. The day after the divorce is finalized, though, the pictures feel offensive. I’ve gotten take-down requests for such pictures multiple times over the years and, most of the time, I reluctantly oblige.
Life isn’t so simple for a photojournalist, however. They don’t have time to “set up” a shot. They don’t get to choose better-looking “models.” They don’t get to wait until the light is better, and they never have a full crew hanging around to make sure everyone looks their best. Photojournalists take the shot that’s in front of them. That’s all. They don’t run the subject past an editor first. They don’t have time to get permission from everyone involved. The moment happens, you take the shot. That’s the job.
Such appears to have been the case on October 7 last year when amateur photojournalist Ali Mahmud took a picture that won the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism‘s Photo of the Year. Nikon and the Associated Press jointly sponsor the award. In the midst of Hamas’ attack on a music festival being held in Israel, Mahmud snapped a photo that includes an image of the corpse of a German-Israeli citizen killed by Hamas terrorists. The image’s content is horrible, frightening, and offensive. However, the photographic quality is on point. The image provokes emotions and captures the reality of war. War is not pretty.
Plenty of people are upset that Mahmud won the award. They claim the photo dishonors the memory of the young woman killed. Some are protesting both the school and the sponsors of the award. Their opinion is that he is taking advantage of a person who was killed in this act of war.
Director of Photojournalism at the Missouri School of Journalism’s Reynolds Journalism Institute, Lynden Steele defends the decision: “The Reynolds Journalism Institute and Pictures of the Year strongly condemn the Hamas attack on October 7, and we continue to mourn the loss of innocent lives and human suffering that is occurring in the ongoing conflict. Reactions to the team Picture Story of the Year express the greater emotions related to that conflict. This year and every year, the photos in the competition are selected by a panel of professional journalists tasked with identifying compelling representations of the significant news events of the year. While we understand the reactions to the pictures, we also believe that photojournalism plays an important role in bringing attention to the harsh realities of war.”
Now, to be fair, there is some reasonable concern that Mahmud and those he was with (including a videographer) may have only been in the position to capture the photo because they had advance knowledge of the attacks. If they did have advance knowledge of the attacks, they had a responsibility to report those attacks. There’s not a lot of question on that matter. However, Mahmud denies having any such knowledge. He was just there, part of the crowd, as these horrible things happened in front of him.
Here’s the thing: war is offensive. From its start until its final cease-fire, there is nothing about war that is acceptable. To illustrate war with benign images of explosions from high above, pictures of warplanes flying in the sky, or even soldiers hiding safely behind a wall, is immoral because it removes the danger, the disregard for life, the utter destruction, and the gut-wrenching reality of war’s horrors. There is no way to adequately, honestly, sufficiently capture war without showing crushed, broken, bombed, shot, hung, and dishonored naked bodies of innocent people who didn’t ask to be involved in the conflict.
We don’t want photos of war that are so watered down that we can’t see the war. We need to be offended by war lest we accept it as a normal part of life. We need to be angry about those who initiate and those who perpetuate war. We need to be disturbed that there are people among us who find these detestable conditions acceptable. Anything less is immoral and makes us accessories after the fact to the murder and destruction taking place.
Yes, the photo makes my stomach turn. No, the young woman didn’t deserve what happened to her. Yes, this is a photo we need. We need to see what really happened. Words are not enough. We need the photo and it deserves the award.
No, I’m not going to show it to you.
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