I’ve never been able to identify a photojournalist’s gender from the photos she takes. Have you?

When Margaret Bourke-White photographed the Nazi death camps for Life magazine, no one cared if she was a woman or not. Her images told the story and that was that.

So why is it so important for some photographers to define themselves as “women photojournalists,” rather than simply as “photojournalists”?

Creeping Political Correctness

More and more today, I come across cooperatives, workshops and panels for women photographers only. As if gender had something to do with the photojournalistic process.

It seems that political correctness has now started to reach the shores of the previously sexless island of photography. It appears that some people, with a highly developed social conscience, want you to know the gender of the photographer whose picture you admire.

As if it made any difference.

Readers hardly glance at a photo credit, so why would they care ? Photo editors — the good ones at least — are gender-blind as long as a story is well told visually.

An Ill-Conceived Distraction

So who is behind this, and why ?

I suspect it’s an ill-considered effort at self-preservation at a time when our profession is struggling to find its way. Communicate that women photographers are more sensitive to human misery, or more in tune with certain subjects. Persuade women photo editors to hire women photographers.

It’s bad enough that photographers segregate themselves by specialty, calling themselves “sports photographers” or “news photographers” or “celebrity photographers.”

Now women are supposed to label themselves “women photographers,” too? It’s a silly distraction at best.

Slowly, I sank up to my knees, the mud sucking me in deeper and deeper.

I was standing on a riverbank near the Bay of Bengal in Bangladesh, photographing villages that had been flooded. Thinking I’d have a better angle if I got closer to the river, I took a flying leap into what I quickly realized was sludge. Each time I moved, the mud pulled me down further.

I noticed the villagers on the riverbank waving and gesticulating wildly. That’s when I heard my guide call out to me:

“The villagers said get out of there, you are standing on the crocodiles’ feeding ground.”

Getting Through with Humor

I’m often asked how I deal with the terrible, tragic and sometimes dangerous situations I see and photograph in my work.

For me, it’s the unexpected, quirky and downright silly moments that get me through.

While working on a project about garbage collectors in Jakarta, for example, I stayed overnight in a hut on a rubbish dump. The stench was overpowering; what the collectors had to walk through was appalling. When I woke up in the morning, I was covered in fleabites from head to toe — and especially on my face.

For several weeks after that, I had to walk around with bright cream on my face. I looked like a West Papuan warrior. I had to laugh about it; what else could I do?

A worker on a rubbish dump in Jakarta, Indonesia.

The droughts in my native Australia can be devastating. Animals have to be slaughtered, because it’s too expensive to feed them. Farmers walk away from family farms with nothing, and water is rationed or used sparingly.

During the worst drought on record, I stood in a field talking to a man whose job it was to remove snakes from houses, where they would often crawl in search of water. As we were chatting, a snake started to slink up and around his body.

The man calmly grabbed the snake, held onto its head and continued with our conversation. That was worth a nervous chuckle or two.

A snake catcher in Victoria, Australia.

Kant on a Rooftop

Filmmakers and authors have long recognized the fascinating juxtaposition of horror and humor. Among war movies, MASH, Catch-22, and even Apocalypse Now — with Dennis Hopper’s mad war photographer — are excellent examples of this.

Once, in the midst of a chaotic, tense Middle Eastern conflict, I was contacted by a government minder who said a man from the university wished to speak with me. I was taken to a house and led up to the roof, where this man was waiting for me.

“I wish to speak with you about Kant and the philosophy of the Western world,” he said.

This was fine except for two things.

One, I didn’t know much about Immanuel Kant.

And two, there were Scud missiles falling all around us at the time — although he seemed oblivious to this fact.

Going to Extremes

Recently, I photographed people in Manila earning a meager living making charcoal.

The area where they live and work is covered in thick, gray, acrid smoke, so intense that I could hardly see while trying to shoot pictures. The workers, many of them children, scratched around in the ashes for wire and nails that could be sold as scrap.

Because of the appalling conditions, the majority of the people in the area have respiratory problems.

As I was shooting, one of the women kneeling in the charcoal dust got up and smiled at me. She waved her blackened hands in the air, threw back her head and laughed.

Was she laughing at me or at life in general? Or was this yet another sign of human resilience taking the form of laughter in the face of extreme adversity?

A rice farmer in the southern Philippines.

Also on a recent trip to the Philippines, I found myself traveling in the southern part of the country, an area populated by secessionist groups, bandits and others. These groups partly fund their enterprises by kidnapping people, especially westerners, and holding them for ransom.

We drove through the villages of the tribal people and up into the hills along a meandering dirt track. Suddenly our car hit a muddy patch, got bogged down and was unable to move forward.

The driver revved the engine and tried to go backwards. This resulted in a punctured tire.

We went into the surrounding jungle to collect bracken, branches and shrubs to place under the wheels to provide traction. The driver revved the engine again. This time, he burned out the motor.

So here we were, stuck in the jungle on a hillside in the southern Philippines, where the best type of income was trading westerners for ransom money. We abandoned the car and starting walking.

We were lucky. We got out.

The Cab Ride Home

After one such harrowing trip, I flew into an Australian airport on a Saturday morning and caught a taxi home.

The driver asked me if I was going to see the football game that day.

“No,” I said.

Then he asked if I was going to the horse races.

“No,” I replied.

“Jeez, mate,” he said. “What do you do for excitement? Get a life!”

At the end of the day, you’ve just got to laugh.

The farmers frantically picked their olives in the blazing hot sun. We were on a boulder-strewn hillside in Palestine, near the edge of a recently completed Jewish settlement.

Some of the farmers had started to carry their bags of olives to their carts, when suddenly a group of settlers came running down the hillside whooping and hollering, accompanied by a man blowing a horn. The settlers swooped into the grove of trees and grabbed for the olives, pushing and shoving the farmers.

Armed — with Cameras

Several of the settlers were photographing the confrontation as others tried to remove the bags of olives. Soon, police and soldiers arrived. One of the soldiers had a video camera to record the event. An officer from the border police had a camera, too, which he pointed at the settlers. The settlers, in turn, pointed their cameras at the border police.

I photographed a scuffle between a settler and the Israeli authorities while several settlers shot video and photos of me.

Here we were in the middle of a skirmish in one of the world’s longest-running conflicts, all photographing each other. Documentary photographers each and every one of us — and each with his own agenda.

In the West Bank, Jewish settlers clash with Israeli authorities after attacking Palestinian farmers over a dispute about olive trees.

Jewish settlers film Israeli authorities who in turn film them during a dispute with Palestinian farmers.

Does Photography Really Make a Difference?

Over the past 70 years, more photographs and footage have been produced to document this small area of the Middle East than any other location in the world.

But, I wondered on that hot afternoon, has it made a difference?

Oh sure, photographers have won awards, become famous and changed the course of their careers because of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. But what has it done for the people concerned?

All this photography — decades of film and now a decade of pixels — and the situation has only gotten worse.

So the question is, does photography really matter? Can it be a force for change?

The answer, as with many things, is yes and no.

During the Progressive Era, Lewis Hine’s early 20th-century photographs of children working in sweatshops were used as part of a successful campaign to reform child-labor laws. Jacob Riis’ late 19th-century images of immigrants living in squalid conditions helped get the New York State Tenement House Act passed.

More recently, however, capital punishment in Texas continues despite Ken Light and Suzanne Donovan’s amazing book, Texas Death Row. And there are more refugees today than when Sebastiao Salgado started showing the world their plight.

It’s About the Audience

The difference in these cases is not the quality of the photography or passion of the photographers; it’s the audience.

As Susan Sontag has put it:

A photograph that brings news of some unsuspected zone of misery cannot make a dent in public opinion unless there is an appropriate context of feeling and attitude.

The Vietnam War dragged on for 16 years despite a steady flow of memorable, award-winning images by photographers such as Don McCullin, Larry Burrows, Horst Fass, Nick Ut, Eddie Adams and Kyoichi Sawada.

Ultimately, though, Ut’s powerful image of the Napalm-burnt little girl and Adams’ photograph of the execution of a Vietcong prisoner did have an impact. They helped create the climate for change.

To again quote Sontag:

Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one — and can help build a nascent one.

A Palestinian boy hurls stones from his slingshot at Israeli soldiers.

Last of the Bedouin

Meanwhile, back in Palestine, I lay on a mattress in a Bedouin camp in the Jordan Valley, looking at the stars and the moon and listening to the restless animals locked in their pens. At dawn, the headman invited me over to his tent so we could share a coffee and watch the sun rise.

Suddenly from the east, a monitor plane appeared and swooped down on the Bedouin camp — photographing the movements of the tribe. The Israeli government is trying to drive the Bedouins away from their traditional grazing lands, because these areas have now been designated military zones.

Israeli military personnel were taking photographs to advance the government’s agenda.

Who knows if their pictures, or mine, or those of the Israeli settlers or Palestinians, will ever make a difference here? One day, perhaps.

A Bedouin tends to his flock of goats and sheep as an Israeli reconnaissance plane films his activities.

(The following is excerpted from Photographs from the Edge of Reality, by Black Star photographer John Harrington.)

I’ve had the privilege of photographing presidents going back to the first George Bush, and if you count President Reagan’s visit to the White House and ceremonies at George Washington University Hospital, where he honored those who saved his life, Reagan too.

Almost every time it was a news event, although from time to time I was the exclusive photographer traveling with a foreign dignitary for a private meeting with whichever president was in office.

Once, when on assignment for National Geographic Television, I had behind-the-scenes access to the White House for a state dinner. Yet, I had never had the opportunity to have studio lighting and the undivided attention of the president before.

Grips and Grins

When I have photographed each president, the opportunities have ranged from a 20-second stint in the Oval Office with a collection of my colleagues, to 20 or so minutes during a ceremony in the Rose Garden, or even 45 minutes to an hour during a primetime press conference.

In this case, the valuable time I had was boiled down to about 10 seconds.

The initial assignment — grip and grins with the President — wasn’t all that. In the end, however, it’s not what something is, it’s what you make of it. It was my assignment to, in a private room, photograph the president in a receiving line with about two dozen VIP guests who had sponsored an event that the president was attending.

The entire time in the room was about 10 minutes or so, and because of the VIP nature of the guests, we brought in lights, both for recycle time and for a flattering quality of light. Beforehand, we tested the lights — two umbrellas, left and right, with the left light about half a stop brighter than the right.

At the appointed time the president came in, and the guests were queued up and waiting for the president to arrive, so I determined that my opportunity to photograph the president alone would likely come at the end.

With precision, the White House staff shuffled each guest pairing in, and each had a moment to chat with the president and first lady, and then the foursome would pose for the camera.

For each guest we would make two frames, just in case one of the four people in the image had his or her eyes closed. In fact, in one pairing the president had his eyes closed in the first image, and in the second image one of the guests had his eyes closed, so we had to “swap heads” in that image so that the VIP guest could have his picture suitable for framing.

Precision When It Counts

Typically, as the president wraps up a meet-and-greet, there is a brief moment or two while security mobilizes to advance the president, staff gets into position, and the president bids farewell to the organizers. When all of the pairings were done, just such a moment occurred, and there were no guests surrounding the president; it was just me and him.

I lifted the camera and said, “Mr. President, look this way for a moment,” and I made two frames of him — eyes to camera, all by himself. The strobes fired as desired, and the background was nondescript enough that I liked it. And with that, he was whisked away to his next engagement.

When I reviewed the two frames, I was quite pleased, and either would have served quite well.

All too often, clients will call with an assignment request and say that the shoot will only take about five minutes, suggesting that it should cost less because of the mistaken notion that we bill by time.

In point of fact, when you only have a few seconds to make a photo, and you’re able to accomplish the creation of a good image in that amount of time, you should be able to command a premium because of that ability. Almost anyone can make a great portrait if they have hours — the test is, can you make one in 10 seconds?

Photo © John Harrington

(The following is excerpted from Photographs from the Edge of Reality, by Black Star photographer John Harrington.)

One thing I revel in being able to do is making the seemingly impossible, possible.

In one such case, a high-tech Internet company needed new visuals to get people excited about their service, which was essentially a new way to allow citizens to get things done with the government. Paying parking tickets online was but one of the things that this Internet company wanted to do, and they had the backing of some big names — General Colin Powell among them.

This particular client contacted me and a few of my friends/colleagues. I came in for the briefing on the project, and they asked me about a few of my ideas and whether I thought we could get the shots they wanted done in 45 minutes.

Say Yes, Then Figure Out How

My first answer is always yes, and then I figure out how to make it happen. One setup was formal portraits, which were to take place in their downtown office, and the next setup was nearby on the steps of the General Grant Memorial, with the Capitol in the background.

I shared with them one of my ideas — one of the founders of the company wrapped in red tape, and the other founder with a pair of scissors, cutting his partner out of the red tape, symbolizing what the company could do for the average citizen.

Telling the potential client this idea was a bit risky, because I wanted to get them excited about the idea, but not to the point that they would book someone else and then give the idea to that unknowing photographer to execute. Yes, I know, ideas are not copyrightable/protected — only the tangible expression thereof is — but still, I didn’t want them using my idea.

The meeting ended, and I felt good about the project. I asked whom the other photographers were that the client was talking to, and I knew them both.

A Winning Plan

A few days later, after I had submitted my proposal, I got the call that I had been awarded the project. I asked the client in a casual manner why they had selected me, and they said that it was not about the money (as I had come in as the most expensive), but they selected me because they thought I was the only one who could do the assignment based upon the plan I had laid out to accomplish all the photos in 45 minutes.

Which is exactly what we did.

To accomplish the shots in that timeframe, we had three different setups, lights, softboxes, a generator, assistants, makeup people, a location manager, and catering. We started at the client’s office, setting up lights there for the portraits. The other two locations were being set up at the same time.

I kept in close contact with the assistants at the other two locations to ensure that we had both of the other setups prepared. After finishing up at the client’s office in less than 10 minutes, we had them travel to the Capitol in 15 minutes, leaving 25 minutes for the remaining shot.

The second shot was of the two founders with the red tape. We had gone out and purchased a hundred or so yards of red velvet holiday ribbon, and we started wrapping up one of the founders.

I wanted to have enough left over to stream toward the camera and down the steps, to draw the eye from the camera to the subjects. The idea was that the guy wrapped in red tape should look a bit like a damsel in distress lying across the railroad tracks.

We carefully laid him down entirely wrapped up, and we had his partner come in with the scissors. I wanted oversized scissors, but we couldn’t find any that were reasonable and not cartoonish, so we used the biggest pair we could find. We knocked out several images and had great results. Using a huge Plume HexOval softbox and shading them with a large scrim, the light on them was extremely flattering.

One Last Shot

Because we had done this one so quickly, I decided that I wanted the founders to be standing in the reflecting pool, and they seemed to go for it. The client and I had discussed this idea in a brainstorming session, but they didn’t think their client would go for it; I thought different.

I suggested to the founders that I thought it would be really cool to do a shot of them standing in the reflecting pool, with their pants rolled up, reading a paper and smoking cigars. They were totally up for it. We had them step into the reflecting pool, which we thought might be a no-no, but we didn’t have a definitive kibosh on it.

As we started the first few frames, which included an assistant in the calf-high water holding the light and softbox that surely would have electrocuted all of them if it had fallen in the water, my location manager — the genius we all know as Charlotte — warned me that a Capitol police officer was coming over to check what we — our entire team of 10 people — were doing.

I told her to intercept the officer, show him the permit, and buy me some time, which she did.

After a back-and-forth dialogue, my second assistant whispered to me that Charlotte and the officer were coming over toward me. Knowing that I had the shot and the entire shoot was a wrap with this third image in the can, I called to the two subjects that we had it, and they started walking toward the edge of the water with the shot done — and all with five minutes left on the clock!

Photos © John Harrington

Two years ago, as I sat on the sidelines of my very first college basketball assignment — Northwestern v. Indiana — I glanced over at the photographer sitting next to me and found myself scrambling to find words to strike up a conversation.

His press pass read “The Associated Press,” and my D90 and 18-105 mm kit lens paled in comparison to his two professional Canon cameras and fast prime lenses.

My memory of our exchange is a bit hazy now, but I recall expressing how fun I thought shooting for the AP must be.

Unfortunately, what was supposed to be a rhetorical question backfired when he shot back, “It’s not that great.”

That quickly put an end to the conversation.

Negative Vibes

My chat with the AP photographer hasn’t been my only buzz-kill encounter with professional photojournalists. Striking up friendly conversations with other photographers from large agencies, I quickly gathered that my outlook on the future of photojournalism was too optimistic for their liking.

“Learn video,” one told me.

Another, chuckling in that “life is tough” sort of way, suggested that I was sensible for also pursuing design and keeping my options open.

I don’t dismiss this kind of advice out of hand. That would be unwise. These photographers have been in the field for years, and their opinions have value. The best way to learn the business is from those who are currently experiencing the changes and the struggles.

That said, I maintain my optimism and refuse to feel discouraged.

Call me naïve, but as an aspiring visual journalist who loves photography, I refuse to believe the industry is so grim that it’s not worth pursuing.

Shifting Mindsets

I think it is largely a matter of shifting mindsets. You can no longer take a traditional approach.

Sure, you shouldn’t go into journalism or photography for the money — but that’s never been the primary reason people went into these professions. You can still find a way to make it.

My peers and fellow photographers at Northwestern have shown me that the possibilities for visual journalism are many and varied. You just have to take initiative and be creative.

Take on different assignments. Don’t limit yourself to just one publication or speciality. Explore the possibilities and pave your own road.

While I have friends who brand themselves as landscape photographers and others as portrait photographers, most of us take photo assignments from multiple publications, offer to take headshots for performing arts students and explore different opportunities.

We create our own business models, jump at every chance to expand our portfolios, and take an entrepreneurial approach to the future.

Full Speed Ahead

I am a strong believer that our society is more visual than ever. For all the discouraging blog posts out there, there are twice as many posts about new technologies that offer more opportunities for photographers than ever before.

With the rise of tablets like Apple’s iPad and high-resolution screens, online publications will feature photographs more prominently — and the color on these tablet screens is absolutely stunning. Stories will always need accompanying photographs, and some stories are simply told better with photographs.

With less than one year left in college, I am frequently asked questions about my future: What do you want to do after you graduate? Do you know where you will end up? What is your dream job?

These answers required less thought when I was five — ballerina, teacher, astronaut. Today, my answers tend to be filled with “um’s,” “I don’t knows” and long-winded explanations that last far longer than the standard elevator pitch.

But I know that I will pursue visual journalism in some shape or form, whether that be photography, design or interactive graphics. I am confident about that.

Regardless of how difficult and unpredictable the future of the industry may seem, my camera remains attached to my hip for most of the day because there is nothing like the thrill of photography for me. That’s why I choose to focus on the endless possibilities ahead.

You know what’s funny? I’ll tell you what’s funny: by continuing to put so much financial pressure on photographers, the media industry will lose its primary source of imagery.

With declining space rates and assignment rates, increasingly obscene rights grabs that border on copyright infringement, unacceptable usage agreements and overall disrespect of the trade, publishers are literally pushing the photo industry to look for new revenues — and respect — somewhere else.

Already photo agencies like VII with news and X17 with celebrity have entered the publishing arena in direct competition to those who used to be their best clients. Others are aggressively investigating how to license images to million of blogs worldwide, while others — like Black Star, for example — have shifted focus to the greener pastures of the corporate world.

Independent photographers no longer bother approaching publications for assignments. They now go directly to NGOs and foundations. Newer players like MediaStorm already generate most of their revenue this way.

Editorial Desertification

We hear a lot about the desertification of various regions of the world. Soon, we will witness the equivalent in the editorial landscape.

Magazines, whether on iPads or not, filled with nothing more than text and lonely generic images.

Textbooks forced to use the same images over and over because there are no more “image suppliers,” preferred or otherwise.

We may be closer than you realize to the day when a certain publication’s photo editor will begin hearing this on the other end of the phone: “Time who?”

Obviously, none of this reflects a future that photographers want. But the increasingly unbearable business conditions are forcing them to look elsewhere for revenue — and, just as importantly, respect.

Photographers will always be around because they aren’t just doing a job; they’re pursuing a passion. But like any passion, it needs to be fed with a sustainable income. For most of photography’s brief history, editorial publications have served this role.

It’s been a long, productive, and mutually satisfying love affair between photography and publishers. But now the editorial world is treating its favorite mistress like an old whore.

The bond is being broken.

Love Stories to Come

You know what, though? There are other places photographers can go to be treated like a princess today.

The Internet has opened new revenue streams. Sure, it’s still the Wild West — but it offers the promise of love stories to come.

And so soon there will be no one left to shoot editorial. No one to shoot wars, politics, archeology or even movie premieres. All that will be left is an endless pile of crowd-generated images of everything that doesn’t really matter. Pretty, certainly, but of no interest. Cheap — but useless.

For now, the old whore still clings to its lifelong lover in the hopes of a change of heart.

But for how much longer?

And yes, you’re right. It’s not that funny after all.

Second of two parts.

As we discussed in yesterday’s post, journalism jobs are disappearing at an unprecedented and alarming rate. The wave of newspaper layoffs has shocked an entire industry of writers, editors and photographers who’ve dedicated their careers to keeping their communities informed, and are now wondering if there’s any future in their life’s work.

So, is there? And if there isn’t, what should you do next?

On Monday, we recommended six first steps for laid-off journalists who are facing these questions after a workforce reduction, and who are interested in assessing and improving their marketability in other fields. Today, we focus on the next steps you should take in your journey — which focus on personal branding.

Even if you haven’t been laid off from your newspaper job, and whether or not you are considering changing careers, personal branding is essential today for writers, editors and photographers — especially online. It opens up your options and enables a much broader range of potential employers (or freelance clients) to learn why they should hire you.

Here are five tips:

1. Showcase your best work online. It’s surprising to me how many writers and photojournalists have never posted examples of their work online. I realize that the rigorous demands of a regular deadline often have journalists looking ahead to the next assignment, rather than back at what they’ve already done. But you can’t allow yourself to be so absorbed in your job that you don’t think of your career. For work that your employer owns, create Web links to your photos or articles and/or get permission from your publication to republish your work on your Web site. Round out your site with other examples of your work.
2. Take your following with you. Many newspapers have become obsessive in the past couple of years about encouraging their contributors to create online followings through blogs, Twitter and Facebook. This can be an important head start for your personal branding efforts. If you are laid-off, continue your blog or photoblog on your own Web site. If you’ve become a subject-matter expert within a particular beat, don’t stop tweeting about it — build on what you’ve started. It may lead to freelance work, consulting gigs or a full-time job, either within or outside of journalism.
3. Start your own business. Even if you still have your newspaper job, it’s not a bad idea to start a part-time business that can grow into something more at the right time. If you are a staff photographer, for example, why not begin to shoot some weddings on the side? You can build up a portfolio, referrals and vendor relationships — all of which will make it far easier to transition to a full-time freelancer if you are laid-off. Black Star Rising contributor Heather S. Hughes is an example of a photographer who took this path; her story is instructive.
4. Stay connected with other journalists and ex-journalists. This applies even if you don’t think your next career will be in journalism. Keeping up with the industry is a must for a number of reasons, including professional networking. But the most important reason is this: it’s a reminder that you’re not the only one going through this. There are literally thousands of people right now asking themselves the same questions and dealing with the same career transition that you are. So get on the job boards, participate in the forums, subscribe to the Twitter feeds, and see what you can learn and share. The Columbia School of Journalism, for example, has a Web page dedicated to helping laid-off journalists, with more than 50 links to helpful sites. Whether you want to find a new full-time journalism job, continue in journalism as a freelancer, or find a new career, you should participate in the conversation.
5. Tell the world who you are. Once you know where you want to go with your career, be clear and consistent in disseminating your brand message — online and off. You’re a professional communicator, after all, so turn those skills to your advantage. Before you write a story or make a photograph, you think of the audience you’re creating it for, right? You want to use the right words and images to appeal to them. Now it’s time to do the same thing with a new audience: the people you want to hire you. Intrigue them; give them reasons to find out more about you in everything you do. If you tell others who you are professionally and then act the part long enough, you will become the brand you have created.

First of two parts.

Regaining your career footing after being laid off from a newspaper job as a writer, editor or photographer is a particularly daunting challenge today, for two reasons.

First, in most cases, there is only one major newspaper in a geographic market, meaning that if you want to find a staff position at a different employer, you will probably have to relocate. Second, of course, is the overall decline in jobs in the newspaper industry, which has seen editorial staffing fall to its lowest levels since the 1950s.

So, if you’ve been laid off as a journalist or photojournalist, what should you do next?

1. Don’t say it; count to 10 first. One characteristic that distinguishes many journalists is candor; you like to say what’s on your mind. If you’ve been laid off, however, it’s just not worth it to point out on your Facebook page that your job could have been saved if the CEO had trimmed his exorbitant bonus, or that your editor is a two-faced schmuck for not warning you in advance. (I give these specific examples because I have actually read rants on these topics online by laid-off journalists.) Remember, burning bridges will never help you. This is particularly true if you are considering an alternative career like PR, where diplomacy is king. So count to 10 — or 1,000 if you have to. Just don’t say it.
2. Accept that things have changed. Tens of thousands of journalists have been pink-slipped in the past two years. Now Editor and Publisher is reporting that there is little chance the industry will stabilize until 2013, with no growth forecast until the year after that. Even then, total spending is expected to be around $37 billion, just over half the $66 billion spent in 2005. How have these trends affected career decisions by journalists? Surveys suggest that fewer than 10 percent of photographers and reporters return to full-time newspaper positions after being laid off. You need to ask yourself if you are determined to be part of that small minority — or if you are ready to look seriously at other opportunities. Even if you do want to remain a staff reporter or photographer, it’s never a bad idea to step back and think about your options.
3. Assess your marketable skills. I meet so many journalists who have been beaten down by their work environments — the constant stress of layoff rumors, buyout rumors, changes in ownership, pay cuts, budget cuts. But here’s the good news that you should never lose sight of: your skills have value. Good writers have the ability to organize and communicate ideas. Good photographers are able to do the same thing visually. Good editors have strong management and leadership skills, earned by managing staffs and budgets, often under intense pressure. Most journalists I know are incredibly resourceful in researching a story; they are highly knowledgeable of current events; and they are good at selling themselves and their story ideas to their editors. Just pull out the descriptives in the previous sentence — “resourceful,” “knowledgeable,” “good at selling” — and you can begin to see a resume for a second career coming together.
4. Run a personality self-check. If you’re like many journalists and photojournalists, you have a strong personality. And it may be that one of the reasons you went into journalism is that you have issues with “corporate” jobs. For example, maybe you distrust authority; maybe you don’t like the idea of promoting a “company line” in your work; maybe you like working on your own rather than in a team; maybe you like taking photographs but don’t really like dealing with people. If you have any of these concerns, I would strongly encourage you to take them into account before accepting a job outside of journalism. Otherwise, you’re dooming yourself to unhappiness and, ultimately, failure. If you are a photojournalist, for example, spend a few days with a friend who has a portrait studio. See how he or she talks with clients on the phone, interacts with subjects on shoots, seeks new business. Then ask yourself honestly, “Can I learn to do this?” And if so, “Would I be able to enjoy it?”
5. Identify and research three specific opportunities that interest you. The bad news after a newspaper layoff is that you probably can’t keep doing what you’ve been doing for a different employer. The good news is that many laid-off editorial staffers are much happier in their new careers, according to survey results. Writers often go on to work for public relations firms as account managers, to corporations as writers, to non-profits as advocates, or to academia as teachers. Photographers can have success starting their own businesses — shooting weddings, for example, while still taking editorial assignments on a freelance basis. So narrow down the field of possibilities by identifying three target opportunities. Then do something that almost all journalists are good at — research. Work your contacts. Identify new contacts. Find out everything there is to know about target companies and positions. That will put you well ahead of most other job applicants.
6. Close the qualifications gap. So, you know you have marketable skills and you’ve found a new career where you’d like to apply these skills. You believe you have the right personality fit for the job. Now what? Your next step is to determine if you have the specific qualifications to land the position. What does the job description ask for? Can you simply rewrite your resume with the target opening in mind, or do you need additional experience or training? Many colleges and technical schools are tailoring programs for adults who need new skills or certifications, working with companies to match their needs. Find out what you need to do to close your qualifications gap — then start doing it.

Tomorrow: the next five things you should do.

Are photojournalists unduly focused on the dark side of life — dead bodies, conflict, misery and the like?

Many people seem to believe this. They think we would climb over loving couples, cooing babies and content grandparents just to shoot the only negative scene at an event.

Maybe this is true for some, but I know many photojournalists who work just as hard to find positive stories.

The Lifeline Express

A doctor performs a middle ear operation on the Lifeline Express, a traveling hospital in India.

In my current project, for example, I am examining not only the challenging aspects of village life and the sometimes damaging impact of modernity and globalization around the world — but also the joy, rewards and improvements that modern life has brought to villages.

A great example of the latter is India’s Lifeline Express, a train that has been converted into a traveling hospital. The train travels across remote villages to treat those with few, if any, other medical options. Doctors and staff from India and overseas donate their services.

On this occasion, the train had parked at the Wardha railway station in the state of Maharashtra. The staff carried out operations and treatment for polio, cleft lips, cataracts, and middle ear and dental problems.

It was amazing to watch and be part of.

Patients and their families wait in a tent which has been erected on a railway platform as a temporary medical waiting room.

Worth the Wait

Often, stories of hope like this one are a long time in the making, because documentary photography can be a slow process where patience in abundance is required. But the end result is worth it.

As Magnum photographer Jean Gaumy once put it, it’s “like fishing. You find the location, check your bait and cast the line. Sometimes you’re lucky and sometimes you are not.”

A woman awaits her operation.

Photos © Michael Coyne.

Amish culture is fascinating to me. But as a photographer, documenting the Amish is a challenge, because posing for a photograph is discouraged by their religion. It is seen by many (though not all) Amish people as an act of vanity.

The Paparazzi Approach

So, what’s the best way to capture the Amish on camera? Some of the advice I’ve read or been given by other photographers includes:

• “don’t stay in one place too long;”
• “use a long lens so you can zoom in;”
• “you have a better chance of photographing Amish children than adults;” or
• “wait until they’re not looking and photograph them from behind.”

Sorry, but I don’t feel like “stealing” moments like that. It makes me feel like a paparazzi, and it’s kind of creepy.

I know if I were outside mowing the lawn or planting flowers and someone started photographing me from a distance, it would frighten me a little.

In my experience, the best photos happen when both parties are present and aware of one another. And this is just as true for the Amish as for other subjects.

Three Tips for Noninvasive Photography

I’ve found three noninvasive ways to achieve good results in documenting the Amish:

1. I feel them out first. I make sure they are aware of my equipment; then, I begin shooting at a comfortable pace and distance. Yes, I find my share of rejection — but I’ve also been greeted warmly and gotten some intimate shots.
2. I ask, “Do you mind if I use my camera here?” I don’t give them a big sob story to get their approval; if they aren’t OK with me shooting them, I don’t. But I often still stay to observe; photography is about moments, whether we capture them with our cameras or not.
3. I don’t obsess on only photographing people. Amish culture offers a treasure trove of subject matter besides the people — things like hand-made furniture, hand-sewn curtains, farm landscapes, lanterns, patterns of wood on the barn, even clothes hanging on clotheslines. I can showcase the beautiful simplicity of the Amish without insisting on including a reluctant subject in an image.

Enjoy the Process

You aren’t always going to leave the house to go shooting and come home with gold. That’s okay; enjoy the process, and respect what is in front of you for what it is.

Wear your camera visibly and know when to use it, and don’t touch it if you aren’t 100 percent confident that you should. Smile instead, and move on to the next possibility.

That’s been a pretty good rule of thumb for me in my work — whether documenting the Amish or any other subject.

His hearing was poor and he shuffled about with the aid of a walker, but 93-year-old H.D. Dennis could still preach to anyone who happened by the one-time grocery store that became a church.

It was a most unusual church of no particular denomination, faded and worn, with 400 feet of hand-painted scripture of plywood signs and cement block towers –- with a weatherworn school-bus-turned-sanctuary that had been parked in the garden for years. That particular day I was this preacher’s flock.

Margaret’s Grocery and Market

I’d been headed to downtown Vicksburg, Mississippi, taking the back roads because I had nothing but time on my hands. A scheduled photo shoot an hour away had been postponed, so I took a different route back to the hotel. Highway 61 is a down-at-the heels stretch of industrial zoned property near the edge of town that had seen better days.

I wasn’t expecting Margaret’s Grocery and Market, Home of the Double-Headed Eagle, but that’s the best thing about back roads: stumbling across the unexpected. I couldn’t keep myself from pulling over.

The Rev. H.D. Dennis added towers, archways, and signs outside Margaret's Grocery and Market to draw people off the highway so he could preach to them.

I knocked on the screen door, ignoring the “closed” sign. Margaret answered but said her husband wasn’t feeling too well that afternoon. I said I’d come back another time. “Could I just make a few pictures?” I asked. She smiled and said, “That’d be just fine.”

I marveled at the folk art that surrounded the place. I promised myself to return before driving back to the delta farmland where I hoped to be shooting the next morning.

A Tour with the Rev. Dennis

As I walked back to my car, I heard the screen door open. The Rev. Dennis slowly made his way outside. He had dressed in a tattered but freshly ironed shirt, I guessed because his wife told him a fellow with a camera was outside and he wanted to look presentable. We talked for a while. I sat right beside him on the porch and spoke in my best “hard-of-hearing” voice, but I’m not sure he heard me.

Rev. Dennis, 93, shuffles with the aid of a walker outside his wife's small grocery store that he transformed into a folk-art-covered church on the outskirts of Vicksburg, Miss.

Then H.D. escorted me around to show off his handiwork that had taken nearly 30 years to complete, though I doubted he would ever consider it finished.

“Every one of those bricks I put there myself, and it was perfectly laid,” he said proudly. “Did you ever see any bricks so perfect?” he asked. No, I hadn’t, I said. He would’ve showed every brick, block and hand-painted signs if he’d had the stamina.

We strolled through his Scripture Garden, walking among the signs that motorists driving past simply can’t ignore. He unlocked the pink and yellow bus that was a permanent fixture in his garden.

It had taken years of scavenging for the beads, golf balls, trinkets and stuff of garage sales and dollar stores that the preacher used to decorate the inside of the bus. The entire inside of the bus had been lined with thousands of colorful odds and ends glued into a mosaic that words simply couldn’t describe.

An Audience of One

H.D. stood at the pulpit just behind the driver’s seat and continued to preach. It was a hot, stuffy old bus, but it was also God’s House, a place of worship. So I sat down on a dusty, worn bus seat and listened.

One thing I’ve come to know: there’s no such thing as a “retired” preacher. Once God calls someone to preaching, no opportunity is missed. H.D. preached as though his church were standing room only, even though I was the only one there to hear him.

Margaret joined us a bit later that afternoon as we picked up where we left off on the front porch. She doted on her husband of 30 years, making sure he was doing OK. She hugged him and left us to talk.

H.D. and Margaret

H.D. married her in 1979. She was the “Widow Rogers” back then, and ran Margaret’s Grocery. H.D. promised he would transform her humble shop into a church that would glorify God — if she would marry him. She agreed, and for the next 29 years H.D. would slowly build his church to preach to whomever came by.

He used whatever materials he could find –- cement blocks, bricks, sheets of corrugated steel, gravel, donated plywood and dozens of cans of red and white paint, more glass beads and baubles, cement, pieces of broken pottery and colored glass, even busted mirrors –- nothing was too humble or useless to get folded into his shrine. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, as they say.

It was all used to invite Jews and Christians, blacks and whites alike to worship there. “God have no white church and he don’t have no black church,” says one sign. “Please Go to Church,” encourages another.

A Final Prayer

The sun was setting, and it was time to go. I felt privileged to meet the preacher and his wife, and document a part of the South that would likely soon vanish. I pressed my dinner money into H.D.’s weathered hands and then we prayed together.

I left Vicksburg the next day after my original assignment was finished. I promised myself to visit H.D. and his lovely wife again if I was ever back that way.

Sadly, Margaret went home to be with her Lord a few months back. I heard that H.D., unable to live alone, was now in a nursing home. Though a local church had been given the responsibility to care for the property, I would be surprised if it was still standing on my next trip to Vicksburg. Perhaps a new business park or a strip mall would be in its place soon. Progress and all.

I have pictures and the memories. They’ve not been published until now. They reaffirm my passion for the back roads of the South — to see what lies over the next hill.

Rev. Dennis prays at the rear of his bus.

With technology making it so easy to profoundly alter photojournalistic images — deleting or adding items, changing the source of the lighting and so on — how can we, the audience, know that what we’re seeing is “the truth”?

The answer is, we can’t.

While it is commendable that Reuters and Adobe, for example, are working to make altered files more readily identifiable, let’s face it: it’s a losing battle. It will never adequately protect news consumers.

It Comes Down to Two People

Ultimately, preserving truth in editorial photography comes down to the same two people it always has — the photographer and the photo editor. If either of these two is ready to lie, there is no protection to be had.

The news audience would like to believe that our eyes don’t lie. That if we see it, it’s true. That a photograph is a faithful representation of a moment in time and space.

We’d like to believe it — but are we really kidding ourselves?

The reality is, the history of photojournalism is riddled with examples of altered images and outright fakes. And there is no clear line between professionally “improving” an image and unethically “manipulating” it.

Eugene Smith was notorious for spending long hours in his darkroom working on his prints. Did this undermine the authority of his work? Certainly not.

Others have cropped, enhanced, shadowed or even damaged their negatives. Robert Capa’s famous images of the D-Day landing might not have looked like that if they hadn’t been damaged. They look real enough.

So where is the limit, and who decides?

Again, it comes down to the photographer and the photo editor. But as our news coverage becomes more crowdsourced, and as editing barriers fall, replaced by automation, it is inevitable that our images will become less and less credible.

I am still amazed, for example, that the Iranian government did not blunt negative Twitter coverage by tweeting fake images by fake users showing the government’s side of the story. Next time it will happen; count on it.

Branding for Truth

The only way to preserve ethics in photojournalism is to have brands that value credibility. We trust (most of us, anyway) the New York Times for the veracity of its information; photo agencies and individual photographers could build their brands around credibility as well.

Does that mean that ethical photojournalists shouldn’t retouch their images? Not at all. It just means they shouldn’t lie about it.

The IPTC consortium could have photographers add an “R” for “retouched” to their image files, for example — making it easy to tag images as altered.

Beyond that, it will be up to audiences to be savvier in analyzing what they see. And it will be up to photographers to brand themselves as instruments of truth, if that’s what they want to be considered.

Do you know what’s on the front page of this morning’s Iran Daily, published in Tehran? You will if you visit the Web site of the Newseum, an interactive museum based in Washington, D.C.

A link on the site called “Today’s Front Pages” lets you view the front pages of more than 700 newspapers from around the world. You can also sort the newspapers by region, download a PDF of any front page you choose, and link directly to the newspaper’s Web site.

“Today’s Front Pages” alone makes the Newseum a valuable resource for journalists, educators, and anyone else interested in the press. But there’s a lot more to the Newseum, and it is definitely worth a visit the next time you’re in Washington.

Preserving and Interpreting Journalism

Located at 555 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W., just off the Mall, the Newseum is a modern, glass-fronted, seven-level building dedicated to preserving and interpreting more than 500 years of journalism — from the earliest European “newsbooks” to today’s state-of-the-art multimedia technology.

When you approach the Newseum, the first thing you notice is a 74-foot-high marble tablet engraved with the 45 words that comprise the First Amendment to the Constitution — words that enable what many consider the world’s freest press and one of its freest societies. Beneath the tablet, along Pennsylvania Avenue, is a sidewalk-level display of the day’s front pages of many newspapers from the U.S. and around the world.

Once inside the 250,000-square-foot building, you have your choice of 14 major galleries and 15 theaters to explore — so you obviously can’t see everything in one visit. Fortunately, the Newseum has prepared a brochure outlining a two-hour highlights tour, which you can pick up at the admission desk. At the desk, you can also learn about the current exhibits, which supplement the Newseum’s permanent exhibits.

Permanent Exhibits

While visiting the Newseum, you won’t miss a minute of breaking news, thanks to the giant “Electronic Window on the World” screen, which is suspended within a 90-foot-high atrium called the Great Hall of News, sponsored by the New York Times and its owners, the Ochs-Sulzberger family.

If journalism history is your thing, delve into the Newseum’s archives, which contain newspapers and magazines from the 19th and 20th centuries; newsbooks from 17th century Europe; and a 3,200-year-old clay brick from Sumer inscribed with cuneiform, one of the earliest known forms of writing.

Photojournalism is well represented in the Pulitzer Prize Photographs Gallery, which contains an extensive collection of prize-winning images and interviews with many of the photojournalists who made them.

Earth-shaking stories are the bread and butter of hard news. The Newseum has an actual section of the Berlin Wall, topped by a lookout tower known as Checkpoint Charlie. The 9/11 Gallery explores the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the hurdles journalists overcame to report the story.

The 9/11 Gallery also includes a tribute to Bill Biggart, a photojournalist who was killed while making images at the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

The Interactive Newsroom lets you experience the challenges print and electronic journalists face as they grapple with getting the story, getting it right, and getting it out to the public on deadline.

Journalists sometimes get ensnared in a tangled web of ethics. Have you ever wondered how you would fare under pressure while toeing an ethical line? Find out at the Newseum’s Ethics Center, an interactive facility that presents actual situations faced by journalists — and then tells you how the journalists responded and what other visitors to the Newseum would have done in their shoes.

My Favorites

I have two favorite displays in the Newseum. The first is in the history section, where a display is devoted to journalists who besmirched the profession’s reputation and their own. Among those featured on this wall of shame are Jayson Blair and Janet Cooke, both up-and-coming newspaper reporters who fabricated stories. Cooke’s fake article, “Jimmy’s World,” about an 8-year-old heroin addict, won a Pulitzer for her paper, the Washington Post, which was then forced to return the prize.

This display is a reminder that newspapers are human endeavors and are thus fallible—and that the answer is better training for journalists and editors, more fact checking and heeding gut reactions (“If it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t”), and increased responsibility and oversight by editorial staff and management.

My other favorite display is the First Amendment Gallery, which explains the “Five Freedoms” guaranteed by the Constitution — freedom of religion, of speech, of the press, of assembly, and of petition. I confess to being something of a First Amendment junkie and nearly an absolutist when it comes to these freedoms.

I plan to write a future column about the First Amendment, so I won’t go into a lengthy discussion here. Suffice it to say that the five freedoms enumerated by a mere 45 words — that’s nine words per freedom, if you’re counting — written in 1791 have done more than perhaps anything else to shape the country in which we live.

Athlete: The Sports Illustrated Photography of Walter Iooss

When I visited the Newseum, one of the special exhibits on display was a collection of photographs by Walter Iooss, who has had a remarkable 50-year career providing memorable and eye-catching images for Sports Illustrated, including more than 300 covers.

The exhibit, which continues through Jan. 16, 2011, includes more than 40 Iooss photographs of such sports icons as Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps, Serena Williams, and Tiger Woods. These photographs demonstrate Iooss’s dynamic composition and bold use of contrast — whether in color or in black and white.

If you visit the Newseum and this special exhibit, be sure also to check out Iooss’s personal diaries, collages, handwritten notes, and a video produced by the Newseum featuring Iooss discussing his work and how it evolved from his interaction with his subjects.

The Freedom Forum

The Newseum, which opened to the public on April 11, 2008, is funded and operated by the Freedom Forum, a nonpartisan foundation dedicated to promoting freedom of speech and of the press. The Freedom Forum also funds the First Amendment Center and the Diversity Institute.

Founded by Allen H. Neuharth — former chair and CEO of Gannett Co., and the man responsible for USA TODAY — the Freedom Forum was a successor to the Gannett Foundation but is not affiliated with Gannett Co. Two other organizations helped bring the Newseum into being—the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and The Annenberg Foundation.

I hope you get a chance to visit the Newseum the next time you are in Washington. If you have already been there, I’d love to hear your reaction to this unique facility.

High dynamic range imaging, or HDR, is a technique through which three or more photographs of different exposures are merged to create a single image that displays a greater dynamic range of luminance, characterized by more shadow and highlight detail.

Attempts to capture a higher dynamic range are not new. They go back as far as the 1850s, with Gustave Le Gray rendering seascapes to capture both sky and sea. In the film era, photographers used ND filters and stacked multiple exposures to create an image showing, for example, a properly exposed sky as well as the landscape.

Reproducing What the Eye Sees

Theoretically, high dynamic range is designed to better reproduce what the human eye actually experiences. If you look outside your window on a moderately sunny day, for example, you can see both shadow detail and highlight detail in a way that your camera cannot. (See some examples of HDR photography at HDR Spotting.)

But HDR is a controversial topic for photojournalists.

Most news outlets have a code of ethics forbidding photographers from altering the content of their images. Many, like the New York Times, specifically forbid HDR imaging in news coverage.

The Times’ John Tierney, however, recently asked readers if this was the right decision:

Some [HDR] images seem otherworldly, but others strike me as more natural than the alternative made by conventional means, like the one of the scene at Glacier National Park … Should The New York Times and other publications consider allowing news photographers to use this HDR process for giving readers a clearer view of the world?

Ethical Headaches

Ideally, the media wants to publish images that represent an event as realistically as possible. They want to put the audience at the scene of the story.

HDR imaging has the capacity to do that, by replicating what the eye resolves in a way that a single photograph cannot.

So then, is a single image — dodged, burned, noise reduced and color balanced — more of an unaltered picture than multiple images, merged to show a higher dynamic range?

Which image is a better representation of the story?

The trick is vetting a submitted image composed of three or more photographs for publication. The photo editors of news organizations have enough trouble catching manipulated images as it is. This might only multiply their ethical headaches.

What do you think?

Photography, like most industries affected by a center of gravity shift to digital, has seen more than a migration from film to data packets. It has also experienced fundamental shifts in how publishers select images.

From Best to Fastest

For a long time, the key factors in purchasing a license for any photograph were its quality and relevance to the intended usage.

Cost, because it was perceived as a tool of value, was not an issue. Magazines had no problem spending a lot of money to send photographers around the world in order to get the best images.

Magazines competed to drive newsstand sales with the best cover image. Having the best photo was a badge of honor.

With the transition to digital, getting the image faster than the competition became more important than having the best picture. Let’s not send a photographer; we’ll just pick a photographer who is already there and get the images up fast.

That lasted a while. But as equipment became cheaper and easier to use, more and more photographers and would-be photographers entered the competition for the fastest image.

Since it is impossible to transmit an image before it is taken, the competition hit a wall where everyone found themselves at the same level.

From Fastest to Cheapest

So what happened next?

Prices dropped.

The competition, as well as publishers’ usage decisions, shifted again — this time to finding the cheapest images.

Today, this is where we are. Decisions are no longer made on the quality of content but on its cost.

It really doesn’t matter if you’re the next Cartier-Bresson. If you are too expensive, you won’t get published.

If the photo budget is already spent on two or three subscriptions to photo agencies and your images are not part of the “feed,” forget it. You might as well go fishing.

Editors will like your images; they just won’t use them.

What the readership of magazines does not see is that they are paying to read publications that do not show them the best pictures, but rather the cheapest.

In essence, the audience is being deceived. Don’t magazines attract your attention with the promise of delivering what they consider the best content? 

As far as photography is concerned, they don’t deliver on this promise. They don’t even try, in fact.

The image-purchasing process is now confined to a pre-established budget. No longer do publishers believe that great images can define their brands and boost their readership. They now view them as overhead.

This is sad; great images are shot every day that are not being seen because of this tyranny of the corporate wallet.

Another Shift Coming?

I think there may be another shift coming, however.

As magazine and Web site publishers continue to think in terms of broadcasting (one to many), our world is changing to social (many to many). Consumers are evolving from passive participants to active contributors.

As this migration deepens, more people will search for their own sources of photography — which they will then share with others. They will bypass the publishing world to view images they like, rather than those force-fed to them by penny-pinching corpocrats.

It is no longer viable to assume that consumers will just passively absorb cheap images. The barriers that kept image suppliers invisible to readers have fallen, permitting them, for the first time in the history of photography, an unprecedented access to the source.

They can see where publications get their content and make their own decisions about what they want to consume.

The next shift is that photographers and photo agencies will find profitable ways to supply their best images directly to readers — offering a compelling alternative to publishers who are no longer interested in the best, only the cheapest.

The monk surveyed the tall buildings, focusing his binoculars on every little movement. Who was doing the shooting? Where would the bullets come from next?

I photographed him nervously, certain that any sniper seeing a Westerner would immediately pick me as a target.

Tourist Resort Turned Combat Zone

Unbelievably, this was Bangkok, Thailand — a tourist resort, not the center of Baghdad or Kabul. It had become a dangerous place indeed, including for photographers, at least two of whom were killed here in street clashes in April and May.

A Buddhist monk searches for snipers in Bangkok.

I moved away from the barricade surrounding the tents that were used as temporary homes by the protesters. I arrived at another barricade and looked around for the colleague I was supposed to be meeting.

Suddenly, a hail of gunfire came from across the barrier toward me.

I stepped out into the open, looking for something I could photograph to illustrate what was happening.

Bang! Everybody froze; a sniper from the nearby building was doing his job.

I telephoned my colleague.

“Where are you?” he screamed over the noise of the gunshots.

“Standing next to the barricade in front of the soldiers,” I replied.

I heard him gasp.

“You’re on the wrong side! Get out of there! The soldiers are starting to move in.”

Eye of the Tiger

I looked around and saw a man with a motorbike. “Can you please take me to the barricade exit?” I asked.

As we weaved among the demonstrators, the driver asked me if I was scared. I didn’t have to think too hard about my reply.

“Yes, yes — I am scared!”

I didn’t have a helmet or a flak jacket. And I knew that waving my camera at the shooting soldiers wouldn’t act as a talisman or give me any protection.

At the barricade exit there was a sign that caught my eye.

“Bangkok City of Life,” it read.

Nearby, there was a collection of gaily painted tiger heads celebrating the Year of the Tiger.

The Tiger of the Chinese zodiac can be warm-hearted, hard-working and independent — but also rash, hotheaded and reckless.

I photographed the Tiger. It summed up Bangkok for me at that moment.

An image of a tiger in Bangkok.

Photos © Michael Coyne.

Last month, I was fortunate to receive a Certificate of Special Merit at the Human Rights Press Awards from the Foreign Correspondents’ Club and Amnesty International in Hong Kong. I won the award based on the publication of images in a Black Star Rising piece on Chinese coal miners.

I share this with you to let you know that as the world of photojournalism changes, the story is not only one of doom and gloom. Yes, many print newspapers and magazines are slimming down or shuttering altogether. But new opportunities are arising, too.

And one of these opportunities is to publish your work in online magazines.

Passionate, Powerful Images

We no longer have the number of magazines that were available in the 1990s and earlier, but we do have a multitude of Web sites that display stunning, passionate and powerful images.

Here are a few of my favorites:

• VII The Magazine
• The Digital Journalist
• RVM
• Life
• SocialDocumentary.net
• Time
• The 37th Frame
• Positive Magazine

Even in China, where we hear many stories about the blockage of the Internet, you can look at a site like Beaugeste Photo Gallery and see wonderful social documentary photography.

It may not be the same sensation as feeling the glossiness of the magazine pages or smelling the newsprint, but I sure get a kick out of sitting down in the morning with a cup of coffee and traveling the world by Internet to be assailed by passionate, fresh photography.

What are some of your favorite places to find photojournalism online?

Two months of anti-government street protests continued today in Bangkok, as more and more photojournalists have arrived from around the world to capture the story in images.

But the pros aren’t the only ones with cameras.

Bangkok Dangerous

Since many of the protesters, known as the Red Shirts, have camped, demonstrated and fought in an area near where tourists spend a lot of time, there have been scads of sightseers running around taking pictures as well.

Red demonstrators carry a coffin through the streets of Bangkok.

Even after guns were fired and more than 20 people, including a Japanese cameraman, were killed in the popular tourist area of Khao San Road, vacationers have persisted in photographing the protests and risking their lives.

Many of the demonstrators also have been taking pictures — of each other and the events as they have unfolded.

Their photographic interests include members of the media. World Press Photo winner Jack Picone, for example, found himself the subject and model for many such images.

Photographer Jack Picone photographs a protester photographing him.

Tourist Trap

I suppose after the amazing pictures that emerged from last year’s Iranian protests, anyone with a camera thinks they can just turn up, shoot some photographs, put them on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube and alter the course of history.

But it’s not that simple.

Many Iranian photographers — amateurs as well as pros — were killed, jailed and tortured for taking those pictures. Demonstrations have a habit of deteriorating very quickly into a dangerous situation, and people die.

Sometimes, Twitter fame isn’t worth the cost.

Bullets used to kill Red demonstrators in the Bangkok protests.

All photos © Michael Coyne.

(In honor of Black Star’s 75th anniversary, Black Star Rising is publishing occasional excerpts from Hendrik Neubauer’s 1996 profile of the agency, Black Star: 60 Years of Photojournalism.)

In its long history, Black Star has seen the best and worst of times in the business of photojournalism. The “high art” of journalistic storytelling in pictures entered a permanent crisis from the end of the 1960s onwards.

Even the apparently symbiotic relationship between Black Star and Life came to an end. In 1972, the magazine ceased publication.

Deathblow for Life

The reason for this was primarily the magazine’s appetite for the huge and spectacular with regard to budget, employees and print runs. Television, which was undergoing an explosive development in the 1960s, stole advertising revenue from Life with its colorful and rapid pictures and thus took away the magazine’s raison d’etre.

However, other circumstances resulted in a deathblow for Life, as a remark made by William Owens suggests:

Life lost substantial advertising revenues, but it had also lost its political role … Life played a cohering role in the creation of the American nation … and in asserting American power internationally, once the restraints of isolationism had been removed.

Perhaps the crisis of confidence experienced by Americans during the Vietnam War expanded into a fatal crisis of confidence in Life.

A New Focus

Ben Chapnick recalls the end of Life thus:

Very frankly, it was like any other day in the history of the agency. It had been a number of years since Life was an important factor in the economic life of this agency, and the demise of the magazine created a sadness emotionally, but had no effect on the agency, the photographers, or the work that we were doing at that time.

In the 1960s, Newsweek and Time became the agency’s most important clients for photojournalism, and a change took place in the way in which Black Star photographers worked on assignments. The magazines developed, in competition with television, an ever-increasing appetite for pictures of events around the world.

The golden era of background stories that reflected the news of the day had become a thing of the past. Henceforth, reporting that focused on events predominated.

Charles Moore, the celebrated Black Star photographer whose searing images of violence and injustice during the Civil Rights Era helped mobilize U.S. public opinion toward change, died last week at the age of 79. The Black Star family joins the world in mourning him.

Ben Chapnick, Black Star’s president, has had the privilege of discussing Moore and his legacy in interviews with the news media since the legendary photographer’s passing. His comments to NPR’s “All Things Considered” sum up what made Moore special:

He was not a cool, detached photographer. He was very viscerally involved with everything he photographed.

He had one thing that most of the other photographers didn’t have: he insisted on getting in close. Very rarely, if ever, did he use a long lens. He was always right in the middle, and quite often, you’ll see him in other people’s pictures.

This insistence on getting in close reflected Moore’s bravery. But Moore was “in close” — and in deep — in more ways than one. He was a Hackleburg, Ala., native taking pictures that many fellow white Alabamans considered a betrayal of their race.

As Moore once told USA Today:

To people who were really bigoted, I was the worst enemy, a Southern boy working for Life. I knew the South. . . . I also knew how to talk back to racists.

A collection of Moore’s photographs can be found in “Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore.” Below are just a few of his many historic images.

Martin Luther King Jr. arrested, Montgomery 1958

Firefighters hose demonstrators, Birmingham 1963

Demonstrators challenge a police officer, Birmingham 1963

Police dogs attacking demonstrator, Birmingham 1963

Demonstrators seek shelter from the hoses, Birmingham 1963

All photos © Charles Moore/Black Star

I admit to being a gearhead. I love tech toys, and that includes not only photography gear but also computers and mobile phones. So you can imagine how excited I was about Apple’s big announcement on Wednesday: the unveiling of the iPad.

I followed the Apple keynote on Engadget, where they pulled images from Steve Jobs’ presentation into their live feed. One image in particular caught my attention: Jobs was browsing the Web on his nifty new tablet, when the infamous blue cube appeared where you would normally see Flash display.

My first thought was “No! How could they leave out Flash support for the iPad?”

I realize that the iPhone doesn’t do Flash, either, but on that small screen it wasn’t an issue. With the iPad’s bigger screen, wouldn’t Flash support be a natural?

And then it hit me. It’s part of Jobs’ grand plan — one that, among its other virtues, just might save photography.

A Man with a Plan

All the tech blogs are complaining about the iPad’s lack of Flash. They complain about not being able to watch interactive content on Web sites. No video streams, no slideshows, no animations.

I don’t think this represents a hole in the product. I believe it’s a hole in our understanding of Jobs’ long-term vision.

Let’s go back a few years, to the introduction of the iPod. At the time, most music was being downloaded illegally — and free. It took time for the iTunes Store to heave Napster into the dustbin of Web history.

But it happened. Now, a rational model that requires people to pay to download music is in place. This model has more recently been extended to television shows, movies, and mobile phone apps.

Basically, Apple has made it so easy to buy content that consumers actually like doing it.

The Last Frontier

So, what is the last frontier for free content on the Web?

Editorial.

It’s no secret that free content is killing the newspaper business and devaluing the work of photographers. How much are your photos worth? How much does it cost to Google a photo, right click and save to desktop?

Now, here’s how Jobs is planning to be our savior:

Apple has a wonderful, intuitive platform for distributing paid content. In fact, the App Store already offers subscription-based payment if the content provider chooses that option — perfect for newspapers and magazines.

But how does Apple get you to pay for content that you’re currently getting for free? Among other things, by not supporting Flash.

This means that to browse interactive content on the Web, you’ll have to buy an app in the iTunes Store to get your daily dose of news. The New York Times has already announced support for the iPad, and you can be sure it will charge for its content.

I see more and more media outlets moving to Apple’s distribution model over time. If they know what’s good for them, they will do it quickly and with enthusiasm.

The transition to a paid model for editorial content won’t happen overnight. But when Napster was all the rage, the pundits said people would never pay for music again. Now they do.

So it may be with editorial content — including photography. We just have to make sure that, as photographers, we negotiate our fair share of the revenues that a new, paid model would generate.

(In honor of Black Star’s 75th anniversary, Black Star Rising is publishing occasional excerpts from Hendrik Neubauer’s 1996 profile of the agency, Black Star: 60 Years of Photojournalism. Here, Neubauer describes Black Star’s role in bringing European talent to the U.S. media.)

Shortly after its founding in 1936, Life Magazine chose Black Star as one of its main suppliers of pictures. Life’s chief picture editor at that time described Black Star’s contribution to the magazine thus: “We discovered we needed Black Star more than they needed us.”

While this statement pays tribute to the work of Black Star’s founders, its bias is not justified. The agency needed Life to the same extent. Its work for Life made up almost one-quarter of its total volume of business.

A Who’s Who of Photojournalism

Meanwhile, emigre photojournalists needed Black Star as a means of gaining access to Life, which offered a competition-free stage for photojournalism in the European tradition at a time when the amount of work available was not great.

The list of those who in the early years signed a contract with Black Star reads like a Who’s Who of photojournalism in the following decades: Walter Bosshard, Robert Capa, Ralph Crane, Herbert Gehr, Fritz Goro, Andreas Feininger, Ernst Haas, Philippe Halsmann, Fritz Henle, Younokuke Natori, Lennart Nilsson, Walter Sanders, Fred Stein, Werner Wolff.

The mainly Jewish emigrants possessed qualities which distinguished them from their American colleagues. Many of them had completed an academic training in subject areas other than photography and had traveled widely. They were all conversant with 35mm cameras. Furthermore, because of their work for the large European magazines, they possessed a journalistic feel for realizing picture essays.

For the emigres, Black Star was a piece of Europe in the middle of New York. Here there were no problems with making oneself understood or with being an outsider. Agents and photographers had the common goal of getting photojournalism accepted in America as a form of visual reporting.

The office doors were wide open for all emigres. Some, like Robert Capa, only stayed for a few weeks, while others, like Fritz Goro, signed contracts for four years.

Goro: “I Felt Exploited”

Goro, who later succeeded in becoming world famous as a scientific and medical photographer, recalls this period with mixed feelings:

It was really an incredible collection of talented people and they lost us all. And they lost us … because of how a picture agency has to be structured … all of this is very expensive. They were sort of forced, maybe against their will because they were nice people, to exploit us. And I felt exploited. They sort of wanted to impress the editors of this new magazine [Life] by having very good but very inexpensive photographers.

Once he had joined Black Star in 1936, Goro received a guaranteed monthly income for his work like other photographers. This was equally true of the period after a road accident which left him unable to work for practically a whole year.

As a result, when he resumed work he was facing a mountain of debts, but he made a very promising beginning with numerous contract jobs for Life. In 1938 Black Star sent Goro to Canada on a freelance project on a fascist organization. He achieved a journalistic coup which led to the arrest of several members once the story had been published in Life.

Black Star billed the pictures in the routine fashion immediately after their publication. However, Goro was subsequently of the opinion that his agents had wasted the opportunity of selling the pictures as an exclusive, for which they would have been able to demand a considerably higher royalty.

This example shows the complicated relationship between agent and photographer, which is often characterized by latent mistrust. Goro’s success with Life made it possible for him in the long term to work directly for the magazine. In 1944 he became a staff photographer for Life for the next 27 years.

Crane: “Stories … Well Sold”

The emigre Ralph Crane and the American W. Eugene Smith provide a completely contrary example. They number among the photographers who were contracted to Black Star for many years. Crane worked for the agency from 1941 to 1951 and still enthused decades later over the creative working atmosphere. He said Black Star helped him

…tremendously by supplying excellent ideas for picture stories and did a great job in selling them. About 80 percent of these stories were well sold. I am really grateful for everything they did for me. In fact this is one reason I stayed almost 10 years with them even though I had the possibility to join the Life staff much earlier than I did.

However, Crane succumbed to the attraction, reputation and large wallet of the Life editorial offices and in 1951 he joined them as a contract photographer.

The healthy relationship between Black Star and Life lasted for decades, although the practice of “stealing away” remained a constant thorn in the agency’s flesh — as Smith joined Crane in working directly for Life in the 1950s.

The experience of Goro and Crane points to differences in the relationship between photographer and agent. But for these and countless other photographers, Black Star represented a milestone on the route to success. Observes current Black Star president Ben Chapnick,

The agency function, despite the change in the marketplace, is still the same. For some photographers, such a relationship works; for others it doesn’t. Different stages of a photographer’s career, combined with their temperament and interests, will determine which avenue they seek.

I vaguely recall getting a press release about the Web site Spot.Us a while back. After a Twitter conversation, I found myself poking around the page once again.

I was impressed by what I saw: A well-designed, organized and professional site asking visitors to donate money to fund news stories proposed by freelance journalists. As an added bonus, Spot.Us would pitch the stories to more traditional media.

I became excited about the opportunities Spot.Us could offer to journalists and the greater news industry. The concept of community and business cost-sharing for in-depth reporting seemed nothing short of brilliant.

Could it be the light at the end of a very long and dark tunnel for journalists, I wondered?

And then I read the fine print. And that light at the end of the tunnel began looking more and more like an oncoming train.

High Goals, Low Pay

Spot.Us is a nonprofit project of the Center for Media Change, supported by highly respected organizations such as the Knight Foundation and USC’s Annenberg School of Communications.

While it should be credited with attempting to develop new avenues for quality journalism, Spot.Us depressingly treads the well-worn path of assuming that reporters and photographers should expect to live on subsistence wages. Spot.Us also grabs all rights to everything forever in a work-for-hire agreement.

Here is an excerpt from the site’s “Mandatory Reading for All Reporters” page:

1. Investigative Report

$600-$1,400 – Most are $1,000

Roughly 60 hours of work at a rate of $10-$25 based on level of experience

Deadlines: Three months to fundraise; two months to report.

• Involves research and original/enterprise reporting that is time consuming.
• Requires expertise in subject matter.
• The story is crafted and the writing has clarity and is organized into scenes.
• Extensive blogging about the reporting throughout the process of reporting.
• Multimedia rich – a part of telling the story.
• A ground upon which new community is built.
• Provides new information that educates and informs.

Spot.Us says most of these stories are 60 hours of work at a $1,000 cap. That works out to a pay rate of a little under $17 per hour.

To be sure, I know plenty of staffers at smaller metropolitan papers making $15 to $20 per hour.

But here’s the thing. The staffers I know making $17 an hour hammering out stories on school board meetings, photos of high school football games and news briefs on potholes are:

• typing away on computers supplied by the company;
• getting at least some paid time off;
• getting health insurance benefits;
• participating in 401(k) plans;
• being reimbursed for the use of their personal vehicles in the course of their work; and
• in the case of photographers, benefiting from free access to tens of thousands of dollars in capture and editing hardware.

In other words, those staffers are effectively receiving far more than $17 per hour in compensation, and it costs media companies far more than that to produce the product.

Real Reporting Costs Money

What’s more, Spot.Us is asking for a lot more of its freelancers than briefs on potholes and quotes from 15-year-old quarterbacks. They seek the kind of investigative and in-depth journalism that we should all be focusing on — but they do it in a way that devalues it.

Real reporting costs money. Phone calls, public records requests, travel, attorney consultations, the use of both consumable materials and durable (but expensive) equipment. And yet, all of these costs are apparently supposed to be covered by that same $17 per hour.

Are reporters for Spot.Us expected to shoot rich multimedia pieces with their cell phone cameras and file their stories from free computer access at the public library?

The Spot.Us contract also requires the journalist to completely indemnify the organization. So in addition to earning what is effectively minimum wage or less, you now have the risk of significant liability thrown in.

I know I didn’t go to college, attend professional workshops, develop sources, network and take the plunge into small business ownership to make minimum wage.

Adding insult to injury, in the event Spot.Us licenses your work to a mainstream media outlet, you see no additional income.

This is supposed to be the new model? It is completely unsustainable.

What I had hoped for in Spot.Us was a central organization that could facilitate the production of journalism, encouraging the general public and granting foundations to join with mainstream media in financing quality reportage — ultimately increasing the pool of dollars available for this kind of work.

Instead, we have another news organization telling the public that journalists — even those producing in-depth, investigative stories — are little more than charity cases who should be thankful for your pennies, nickels and dimes.

In a Black Star Rising post last month, Paul Melcher beseeched photojournalists to not settle for trite images of “dying Africans” and to instead seek to cover the continent in a richer, more well-rounded way. I couldn’t agree more.

And as a photographer based in South Africa, I have a suggestion for those media organizations that wish to portray Africa more accurately: hire local talent.

Parachuting In

The perfect opportunity is approaching. Next June, the world’s media will turn its attention to South Africa, host of the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

Beyond the action on the field of play, many publications will use the tournament as an occasion to examine other facets of African life. International photographers will arrive in force, and image syndication outlets and picture editors will compete to showcase the most compelling stories.

While I welcome the attention, I’ve found that foreign journalists and photographers often produce a slanted view of my homeland. Africa isn’t all about starving children, AIDS, dilapidated housing, and conflict — but all too often that is the story that the rest of the world sees.

Too often, big media organizations rely on parachuting the same big-name photographers into one part of the world and then another. This limits their capacity to offer a balanced, nuanced portrait of Africa.

Like a Local

Hiring locals to participate in the coverage — either independently or in tandem with foreign photographers and journalists — would help. No one, after all, knows a country like a local.

We know, for example, that the excitement surrounding the 2010 World Cup has been amazing. We’re seeing vast swathes of the country transformed in preparation for the event. We’re watching as colossal stadiums are constructed, jobs created, and communities benefit from new investment.

In other words, we know there are countless positive stories to be told. Foreign news organizations just have to look in the right places to find them — and that’s where local photographers can help.

One organization working to report on the World Cup from an African perspective is Twenty Ten. As its Web site states:

The Twenty Ten project is inspired by the 2010 FIFA World Cup and the media opportunities this has to offer. It will be the first time that the FIFA World Cup competition takes place on the African continent. Football plays a vibrant part in life in communities across the continent. Taking a cue from this, Twenty Ten aims to give African journalists a voice, both in Africa and worldwide, by offering them an opportunity to express their own views of African reality, as opposed to having to depend on foreign news organizations.

Another organization, African Pictures, looks to supply the media with content produced by Africans.

Telling Our Own Story

I understand the instinct of foreign media organizations to go with the tried and true in photographing major events like the World Cup. They think it’s safer because it’s the way they’ve always done things. They know “what to expect.”

But foreign photographers delivering what foreign editors expect is exactly why perceptions of Africa are so skewed, and why coverage of Africa is predictable. It’s time to let the locals participate in telling their own story to the world.

I do not want to see another photo essay, multimedia presentation, or visual of any kind on the subject of dying Africans. Never, ever again. Enough.

I understand that these images can be compelling. I understand that the photographers seem to care. But at this point, the harm done by such photos outweighs the good.

Blood, Despair and War

In no small part because of the documentary photography we see from Africa, Americans have developed a distorted perception of this wonderful continent. Not every country in Africa is at war. Nor is every African an orphan dying of AIDS or malnutrition. Nor do all Africans live in broken-down shacks, wearing nothing more than ripped jeans.

Unfortunately, too many in our industry believe that “serious” photojournalism should focus on blood, decay, despair and war. This belief is perpetuated by photo festivals like Visa pour l’Image and others. This year’s event at Perpignan celebrated photographs featuring more violence and gore than a Tarantino movie.

And for this kind of photojournalism, Africa has proven a convenient feeding ground.

Although most of these images do not lie, together they do not tell the truth. They do not present a complete picture of Africa, or anything close to it. Their effect is the equivalent of putting a loupe on a beautiful dress to highlight its one tear, ad infinitum.

The NGO Influence

Beyond the biases about what “serious” photojournalism is or should be, there is a business explanation for what’s going on here. More and more of the documentary photography we see these days comes from NGOs, rather than the editorial press.

Rich people give money to NGOs, which then hire photographers to document their work. And because these organizations operate in the poor, war- and disease-stricken areas of Africa, that is what we see from NGOs. As international photojournalism from the editorial press continues to dwindle, NGO photojournalism may soon be all we see of Africa.

Just imagine what your perception of the United States would be if all you saw were images of 9/11, Katrina, crime-plagued ghettos and nothing else. Would you ever consider coming here for a vacation?

A Perverse Playground

Africa, or at least its despair, has become a perverse playground for too many photojournalists. It’s become a place to earn your merit badge as a documentary photographer. And so we get the same photo essays and multimedia presentations repeated over and over again, to the saturation point.

Interestingly, however, most of these merit-badge projects can only be found online today. Magazines won’t publish them even if they are technically brilliant; the editors, like their readers, are fed up — bored.

By settling for tired cliches rather than searching for richer realities, photojournalists are not only distorting audience perceptions; they are ultimately chasing away the audience.

So please, no more images of half-naked, dying soldiers covered with flies under an imponderable sun.

No more pictures of critically malnourished 3-year-olds staring mournfully into the camera.

No more photos of Kalashnikov-toting tweens walking barefoot on dirt pathways amid the empty savanna.

At this point, all a photojournalist does by taking such photos is to make Americans yawn and turn the other way.

Instead, make us hope. Make us see the diversity of Africa’s humanity. Make us empathize and connect. Make us want to get involved.

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

– Thomas Edison

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that the media industry is having a difficult time at present, even without the global recession. The digital revolution, while opening up exciting new channels of communication, is also rendering some of our pre-existing business models obsolete and forcing the redefinition of others.

Working in the business, it’s easy to get despondent about all this — because change is hard. But once you move beyond denial to acceptance, it can also be energizing. We are entering an era in which the photographer and art director can explore many more creative opportunities and visual solutions, no longer limited to just print or television.

Not all of our explorations will end in success. Like Edison, we may fail 10,000 times for every victory. But there is a thrill in the challenge.

The Video Opportunity

As an art director, I can certainly envision photographers utilizing their skills across a number of emerging sectors to broaden their commercial base and fill the voids left by declines elsewhere.

For example, it was predicted at the recent Online News Association conference in San Francisco that by 2012, 95 percent of all online content will be video. Even if that figure proves optimistic, that is certainly the direction we are heading. And that presents opportunities for photographers.

A photographer assigned to produce a portrait for a magazine, for example, could easily produce a short sound-bite video of the portrait subject to accompany the story online. Using a camera like the video-enabled Canon 5D, there would be no need to bring additional equipment.

Taking advantage of this access gives the photographer an inside track as the market for online video continues to grow.

Annotated Portraits — and Other Ideas

But the opportunities go beyond video. Consider a recent portrait by photographer Jonathan Worth of science fiction writer and Boing Boing co-editor Cory Doctorow.

Jonathan’s portrait was annotated by Doctorow to allow the viewer to explore the writer’s study — combining the image with words to identify the books on Doctorow’s shelves and the personal objects on his desk.

When Jonathan showed this portrait to me, I began to wonder how this approach might be integrated into one of my company’s online magazines. I am continuing to explore this possibility through discussions with editors.

That conversation may lead nowhere, but it is the dialogue itself that will ensure the media’s long-term survival — and the success of photojournalists and others.

Find those 10,000 ways that don’t work, and we’ll ultimately find the ones that do.

For over two years now, I have been trying to photograph a coal mine in China to show the conditions of the miners. The coal mining industry in China has been called the world’s most dangerous; it is reported to claim the lives of over 5,000 workers each year. And it’s not only the miners who are suffering. In the mining areas of Yunnan, more than 60 percent of the children under the age of 14 are affected by lead poisoning.

Not surprisingly, the Chinese government does not allow local or international photographers anywhere near the mines or miners. I knew if I wanted this story I would have to be patient — and persistent.

A Contact Pays Off

So whenever I was in China on a different project and had the opportunity, I asked officials and others I met if they could help me get to a mine. The requests were always refused, but over time I built up a reasonable stable of contacts in the Yunnan mining region.

Then, one day, one of these contacts called me. He said he knew someone who knew someone who might be able to get me close to the mines.

I followed up on the contact’s lead and ended up driving around China for several days, meeting with one person after another, until finally I found myself standing in the middle of a coal mining village in Yunnan.

Portrait of a coal miner in Yunnan, China.

Shooting the Village

Coal miners passed by pushing carts laden with mining equipment, so I quickly shot a picture with the main street as a backdrop. There were children playing on the streets, and I photographed them as well.

I was then taken to an upstairs room, where I had wait to see if the management would allow me into the mining area. Fortunately for me, the room had a view over the village — so I was able to get pictures showing it covered in coal dust.

The mining officials eventually led me to the entrance of the mine, where I waited for the workers to emerge.

A worker relaxes after emerging from the mine.

Following the Miners

A tall man wearing a tin helmet with a lamp and a pick over his shoulder stepped out of the shadows and slowly made his way up the steps. I’m sure he was bewildered to find himself the subject of such photographic attention.

More miners followed, stepping up into bright sunlight. They were covered in coal dust; it was ingrained in their clothes, hands and faces. There were tiny pieces of coal embedded in their lips. Obviously, the cotton masks that hung around their necks were not enough to stop the coal dust getting into their mouths.

I followed the miners up to their changing rooms and then into the public baths, photographing them as they shed their mining gear and soaked away the grime in the steamy bathhouse.

Miners wash in the public baths.

Never Give Up

For two years, everyone I asked about this story discouraged me from pursuing it. They said I would never get the access I needed. Now I had it.

I plan to use the images in my upcoming book Hearing the Grass Grow, about villages disappearing around the world.

The lesson here should be obvious, but it’s one that can’t be stated often enough: Don’t give up on the stories you believe in. With patience and persistence, you can make them happen.

All photos © Michael Coyne.

As group design director for a large U.K.-based publishing company, I’ve found that understanding the photographers I work with is an integral part of my creative process.

What motivates a photographer to take the photographs they do? How do they like to work? What are their influences and interests? These are all questions I ask myself before commissioning a photographer for a specific project.

Do You Know Your Art Director?

But I wonder how many photographers really understand their art director in the same way? I’m not talking here about understanding the brief — I’m talking about understanding the person and what motivates them.

For me, the photographer/art director relationship is a collaboration; the photographer and I discuss our ideas and thoughts. I’m not one of those art directors who creates a sketch and presents it to the photographer for execution. I want to have a dialogue through which we explore the brief. In some cases this might entail a brief telephone conversation, but in others it might require a number of face-to-face conversations over a period of time.

Nothing is better than face-to-face communication for building a relationship. Having said that, I can also learn a lot about the photographers I work with — or am considering working with — online. And photographers should be using the Web to learn about their art directors, too.

Today, when photographers call to make an appointment to show their books, I will generally look at their Web sites to gain a certain understanding of them, so that when we do meet we are able to discuss their work and approach in a little more depth.

Social media tools like Twitter enable photographers and art directors to learn even more about one another, and to build upon their relationships. For example, I used Twitter to ask photographers what I should write about in this blog post — and I plan to continue using Twitter to get your feedback and questions that may form the basis of future posts.

Understanding Passions and Influences

So what if you are interested in learning more about an art director that you work with, or would like to work with? Well, in my case, if you follow my Tweets or my Posterous postings, you will quickly pick up information about my influences and passions.

In terms of magazine design, these influences include Russian émigré Alexey Brodovitch, who art directed Harper’s Bazaar from 1938 to 1958; the German title Twen, art directed by Willy Fleckhaus; the British magazine About Town in the 1960s, art directed by Tom Wolsely; and the art direction of Swiss magazine Du by Roland Schenk, who would later become design director at Haymarket Publishing — a position I now hold.

Of course, many other magazines and art directors have inspired me and continue to excite me, but these four art directors are constants and have one passion in common — photography. As photography is a passion of mine as well, I am an avid collector of photography books and regularly attend photography festivals. I also interview and write about photographers from time to time. And I post about all of these loves on Twitter and Posterous.

I also post about things I don’t like — which can be equally valuable to a photographer who would like to work with me.

And the same is true for many art directors today. It’s easier than ever for you as a photographer to get relevant background information before you ever pick up that phone to ask to show your book.

Understanding your art director can help you to earn assignments, build relationships and, ultimately, do better work. The best photographer/art director relationships are stimulating, exciting, fresh, even symbiotic — all of which ends up being reflected on the printed page.

Manuel H. Rodriguéz, 89, died last week after a long illness. Manuel H. was the Colombian Capa: a man who for more than half a century captured the history and “moments” of his country with his emblematic Rollei. And like Capa, his career in photojournalism was born out of chaos and violence.

Call it circumstance, or destiny — but life has an uncanny way of sweeping certain people into the “moment.” For Robert Capa, undoubtedly the greatest war photographer of our time, that moment came when he photographed the Spanish Republican militiaman falling after being shot in his hills of Andalusia on September 5, 1936.

Assassination and Uprising

For Manuel H. Rodriguez, his moment erupted on the morning of April 9, 1948. “It was a Friday, and the day was clear,” recalled Manuel when I spoke with him last year. “I had just left the Café Colombia where I was talking with my brothers about bullfighting. It was around one o’clock when I heard on Radio Santafé that [Liberal presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer] Gaitán had been shot,” he recalled with painful detail. “Gaitán was a leader of my medio (class).”

Colombian photojournalist Manuel H. Rodriguez died last week at age 89.

Bogotá in 1948, according to Manuel, was a “divided city” where political tensions ran deep. And so too, the anger of the working classes at their lack of representation in government. Liberals and Conservatives were seen to defend the interests of an elite; those well-to-do families who imported their goods from the finest shops in Paris and lived behind the stonewalls of La Candelaria. The Conservatives were the party in power under President Mariano Ospina Perez. The Liberals were the opposition and supported their man, Carlos Lleras Restrepo.

Gaitán was also a Liberal — except that like Manuel H., he was born on the wrong side of the tracks. So when this man from the Las Cruces neighborhood was shot, while stepping out of his office for lunch, on the corner of the Carrera 7 and Jimenez Avenue, the reaction was immediate and violent.

There are no records of exactly how many people were killed in the aftermath of the assassination of Gaitán, but the carnage and the destruction of the city was absolute. The street cars of Bogotá, operated by the Ferrocarril Central del Norte, where Manuel H.’s father worked, were set ablaze by an angry mob. Shops were looted. Fires blazed out of control. Angry men stormed the Ferreteria Berrio to steal machetes and marched towards the city center looking for revenge.

In one of Rodriguez's famous images, Colombian police officers capture a suspected rebel on the streets of Bogota during the 1948 civil uprising.

Manuel H., just seven years younger than his European contemporary Capa, didn’t need to photograph a civil uprising in a faraway country. He had one blazing outside his doorstep. “I saw these men with machetes and they started posing for my camera. I took two pictures,” he remembered. “Then they started following me to take my camera,” he said with the clarity of a cinematographer. “They damaged my camera strap.”

When the civil uprising, known as the “El Bogotazo,” erupted, Manuel was 28. He had already been working for more than a decade as a typographer in a local printing press in the center of town, in order to help his family make ends meet. Photography, until that moment, had only been a pleasant pastime, which offered him the possibility of taking family portraits and snaps of daily life in different parts of the city where he was born. “I wasn’t a photographer. I was just an ordinary person who took pictures.”

Armed with a Rolleiflex, which he had purchased with his savings, Manuel started taking pictures of everything he witnessed on the streets of Bogotá that fateful day. He went to The Ritz to witness the destruction of the grand hotel; he convinced a family friend, a nurse on duty at the Clinica Nueva, to get him inside the hospital where Gaitan’s bullet-ridden body was rumored to be. “There were snipers on the rooftops,” he recalled.

Life as a Photojournalist

For Manuel H., life as a professional photographer began the following day. “I went to the Cementerio Central, which was very familiar to me. I was walking among the bodies when all of a sudden I saw the body of a naked man. The only person there among the corpses who was naked.” Then in another twist of fate, which Manuel H. refers to as “coincidence,” he realized that he had stumbled across the bruised and blood-soaked body of Gaitan’s assassin, Eduardo Roa Sierra.

“It was the identity of a person. Good or bad,” he said about what he felt when he saw the face of the man who in an instant had silenced the dreams of so many. And with a couple of clicks of the Rollei, Manuel H. the photojournalist was born. “I was no longer a typographer!” he exclaimed with a sigh of relief.

Sixty years later, Manuel H. was still taking pictures in his studio on Carrera 7, next to a theater that bears the name of Gaitán. His studio was a shrine to photography, with nearly every inch of wall space covered with his black-and-white portraits. There are thousands of other pictures — some 700,000 to be precise — all catalogued and filed in cardboard boxes.

Near the end, Rodriguez snapped instant photos for passports to help make ends meet.

In his final years, Manuel H.’s health was failing and money tight. Despite having photographed for every publication in his country, especially the leading dailies, for more than half a century, he received few royalties from his work. He lived in a rented apartment, just blocks away from the streets and places that made him a legend.

But for Manuel, photojournalism was never about making money. “Money ends, but the picture remains,” he told me. “Without photography there is no history.”

[This post is adapted from an article that originally appeared in The City Paper, a free Colombian newspaper launched by the author. The story and accompanying artwork are republished with his permission.]