SoJ Web Report | Feb. 2, 2011
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| Courtesy photo |
| Michel du Cille, BA'85, is a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner who fears, "We photojournalists lost our mojo. Some of us moved away from the most important aspect of our craft: storytelling." |
A photo story and Q & A on du Cille’s 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning series on wounded U.S. soldiers appeared in the Fall 2008 issue of Newswire.
Newswire: What major changes have you seen in photojournalism in the past 10 to 15 years, and how would you assess state of photojournalism today?
Michel du Cille: Photojournalists face an uncertain but promising future. Photojournalism may be going through some kind of “future shock.” The term refers to a certain psychological state of individuals and entire societies, introduced by Alvin Toffler in his book of the same name. Toffler’s shortest definition of future shock is a personal perception of “too much change in too short a period of time.”
Unbearable anxiety exists today in the newsrooms of newspapers and magazines. Years ago convergence became the “new Coke” for newsrooms — the prospect of the print world morphing to the Web and television. The reasons were, of course, warranted; newspapers, especially, were losing massive numbers in readership. Something had to be done. In that mad rush to attract and keep eyeballs, especially for the ubiquitous Web, entire photography departments began requiring still photojournalists to capture both still and video images on most of their daily and advance assignments.
So what’s the problem with that? Nothing much. Except we photojournalists lost our mojo. Some of us moved away from the most important aspect of our craft: STORYTELLING. We became fascinated with technology — digital still and video toys. The great standards of photojournalism — capturing the moment, intimacy and emotion in pictures — became secondary to the rudiments of technology and glitzy images.
Training for photographers for the new milieu of video and multimedia was almost nonexistent. Still photographers and reporters were handed video cameras to rush out and make video. Photographers were told to make still images for print, but “don’t come back without some kind of video.” And any video was good video. They just had to get it up on the Web. It all happened very fast, and it was a bad time for us.
But recently photojournalism is beginning to settle to some extent. Besides the obvious advances in digital photography, photojournalism has changed from single images or a few pictures for the print publication to more essay presentation. Because of the Internet, the story demands are almost all for multimedia (photo galleries, audio slideshows and video).
Newswire: What options are open for new photojournalism graduates, and what advice would you give students who want to become photojournalists?
Michel du Cille: In today’s newsrooms the options for photojournalism are promising. The modern newsroom handles both Web and print publications; the need for sophisticated multimedia is infinite. The new graduate should have a strong portfolio that demonstrates these abilities:
- First, be a visual great storyteller. But make sure you are able to tell the complete story as a writer and as a visual journalist.
- Have excellent skills in multimedia (still images, audio slide show presentations, good video mechanics).
- Develop your own stories and execute them from start to finish.
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