The collection of Pulitzer-Prize winning photographs which opens at the Frost Museum this week brims with pathos and the passage of time. The photos are expertly composed; that’s quite a feat, as most were shot in what Henri Cartier-Bresson called “the decisive moment”—that split second when everything makes sense, only to descend again into chaos. But they’re not art. They could be, but then they wouldn’t be photojournalism. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, a photo is a photo is a photo. Nothing within the picture plane can be used to ground a photograph securely within the different fields of art, journalism, advertising, or, as we have seen over the past decade, social media. As such, all designation takes place outside the frame—in the photographer’s intent, in any alterations, and in our reception. The journalistic photograph has a specific relationship with truth that, while not counter to the goals of art, often gets in the way. Take a moment to examine the portmanteau at the root of this debate: photojournalism. (-Graphy, the drawing part, has been notably dropped, and not just because the word journophotography sounds ridiculous). No, photography is truncated. It is placed as prefix, as adjective. It is, thus, secondary to journalism and to the pursuit of journalistic truth. RELATED LINK "Four reasons why great photojournalism is art" by Eric Newton on KnightBlog.org Consider Walker Evans’s photographs of Alabama sharecroppers. These images have become unhinged from the story they once illustrated, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” James Agee’s chronicle of the Great Depression. For better or worse, they now stand alone, searing portraits of timeless poverty and desperation—hardships that greatly outreach the initial assignment from Fortune magazine. Much as the farmers were uprooted by the Dust Bowl, the images have also been deracinated, as is evidenced by Sherrie Levine’s “After Walker Evans” series (1981) of direct appropriations. They now exist on their own, as art. The journalistic photograph often depends upon the story it illustrates. The caveat that this happened, this is real saves many an image. Kevin Carter’s “Waiting Game for Sudanese Child” (1994) features a vulture waiting patiently for a starving toddler to die. This image’s power relies on the fact that that vulture and that child were both once alive. (It’s also fueled by Carter’s subsequent suicide, but that’s another story). Pretend that the image was staged, however, and it immediately becomes lurid and overwrought—a cartoon of grief.
