If the war in Ukraine is the biggest story in the world.... are the next generation of great photojournalists there??

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I've never been a war correspondent, so I have no personal experience. But from what I've read, it seems it varies depending on the war, the combatant, and the period. Wondering around on a battlefield own your on seems suicidal although some correspondents and photographers have done that and some have paid the price. Being embedded gets you to the front lines surrounded by some protection of the troops. But they're still shooting at you.

I suppose if you stay in your hotel in a capitol drinking Martinis, and just pass along information that the government is feeding you, it's safer. But then you're just regurgitating the government propaganda, something I think we're getting a lot of in the current Ukrainian-Russian conflict. Of course, that's how governments control war news to their advantage. As far as censorship, the American manual I posted in my earlier post regarding news censorship was issued during WWII. Obviously things changed in Vietnam and were way more open and then again in Persian Gulf wars. So times change.

But it's still a dangerous profession. Besides getting shot, governments can arrest you as happened to the Wall Street Journal reporter in Russia a few days ago. They called him a spy. But who knows? It's a chancy profession and you have to like excitement. Are you interested in doing it Rob?
 
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Rob Skeoch

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I don't want to go to the front line but would be interested in photographing everyday people living while the war is happening around them.
 
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I don't want to go to the front line but would be interested in photographing everyday people living while the war is happening around them.

The front line is in cities and towns. The big cities like Kyiv would be safer.
 

CMoore

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It is more a matter of Wanting to be than "having" to.
There are no Uber, Taxi, Buses in a war zone.
The Russian or Ukrainian Army is how you get around.
It behooves a photographer to make friends with Russian or Ukrainian military to get informed of and then transported to areas of current or planned action.

There is no lonelier place in the world than to be a solo photographer in a war zone.
If you get shot or shelled, you will be glad to have access to medics or possible evac to some place safer. It might save your life.

If soldiers are aware of you, they are much more accepting of being photographed. Suspicions and tensions often run high in war. Much safer to be a known (and liked) body
 

KitosLAB

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I'm very surprised that this thread came up. And grateful. Personally, I could not pick up a camera for half a year after the attack on Kyiv. Banal phobia. By the way, today is the anniversary of the liberation of the Kyiv region from the aggressor. This is my good friend Igor Ivarovsky.

Some of his work directly from the front

Work with a kitten is called "Hungry but unbroken"
 

KitosLAB

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Where did my phobia come from? A year ago, the Russians put marks on Google maps to strike. The labels were refined and cynical. They designated the targets as "Edemus Funeral Agency". Our women, hiding with children in basements around the clock, wrote complaints to Google that the information was false. The fear of picking up is the fear of giving information to the enemy. It was easy for me to pick up a gun, but I couldn't pick up a camera. Maybe I'm a coward. It would be easy for me to do this in a foreign country. More good photos here
 

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I guess this may be part of the reason why there isn't more reporting from the front lines, but I think practical military considerations are far more important: photographed positions can easily be geolocated and targeted.
100% correct! It is for this reason that if you are not built into the group and even without being at the front, it will be difficult for you to photograph. You will constantly arouse suspicion among both the locals and the police. In Vietnam and the Persian Gulf there was no concept of "Geolocation", in Afghanistan it did not matter much. Perhaps this is the first such war when, having indicated your geolocation, you can expect a blow to this place in a few minutes. During the winter, the Russians shelled the electrical infrastructure. If the locals would see in any way a person who photographs transformer substations, then the photographer would have big problems
 
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wiltw

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My question: Are there enough outlets to encourage photojournalism? Life, Look, Time and Newsweek

The New York Times has had a number of photographers in Ukraine, both prior to and during the war there. And CNN has a number of what I find to be very striking images

 

Lee Rust

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It seems to me there are plenty of competent professional photographers covering the Ukraine war these days, but the probablity of seeing the work of any one individual is really quite small.

While forty or fifty years ago there was a limited number of international periodicals or channels where the work of photo-journalists would be published, today there are many hundreds of thousands of outlets, so it's no wonder that selected images don't get seen by everybody all at once. In addition, contemporary social media completely bypass the traditional mass media pathways, so anybody with a smartphone can be their own reporter, photographer, editor, publisher and worldwide broadcaster all at once. This is a huge shift. The very concept of what it means to be "professional" has to be recalibrated for the internet era.
 

Arthurwg

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Thanks KitosLAB for posting. Very powerful, great pictures. I wish the world could see more of these in mass market publications like we could in the old days. Now, we have to hunt for them.

A photographer friend of mine, Rita Leistner, traveled on her own in Iraq during that war. Her pictures, along with those of three other independent photojournalists, appeared in a book, "Unembedded," published in 2005.

My own exposure to war photography took place when I was a child with the soft cover publication of spectacular Navy war pictures, edited by Edward Steichen. I believe that sold for 10 cents a copy.
 
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Here's a photo essay in the NY Times. Don't take this the wrong way but it supports my previous discussion about censorship. There are photos of dead Russian soldiers but not dead Ukrainian soldiers. These things are controlled by the governments of the combatants. So photojournalists' hands are often tied to show the full story.
 
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Note that I am not mentioning the politics behind the conflict in keeping with moderators' rules. However, discussing the truthfulness of photos in war in general due to censorship and other influences as an explanation of the limited value of war photographs should be allowed. If there is something I'm missing, please let us know.
 

KitosLAB

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Here's a photo essay in the NY Times. Don't take this the wrong way but it supports my previous discussion about censorship. There are photos of dead Russian soldiers but not dead Ukrainian soldiers.
Wow! But here everything is simple! In order to see the killed Ukrainian soldiers, you need to be either on Russian territory or directly on the battle line. There are a lot of cars with white crosses around me, these cars are transporting the dead. I just returned home, I sent packages to the USA and at the bus stop I saw the car of the On the Shield organization, which is evacuating the dead. I have a lot of friends and acquaintances who died. Everyone understands and sees this. And Oleksandr Glyadelov's video ends with shots from a huge cemetery and the words "They will be avenged for them"
This is farewell to Da Vinci on the Maidan. No one is trying to hide and hide from reality. We honor the memory of our Heroes and understand that this can happen to absolutely anyone
 
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bluechromis

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My impression is that, at least in the US, the profession of journalism and especially photojournalism, has been in sharp decline. Many print news publications, like newspapers, have been hemorrhaging readership and sometimes closing down. There are stories of newspapers firing their photojournalists en mass. Will online alternatives pick up the slack? A friend that is a photojournalist says that it is hard to get assignments now. Many of the publications that formerly hired him are gone. Many of the remaining publications and media outlets often tell him that they don't need professional photographers anymore, they just use phone pic's that amateurs send in. He was not covering international events and some places he worked with were not news outlets but were travel magazines etc. A major international event may be a bit different and will attract many of the remaining elite photojournalists.

But beginning photojournalists need to start somewhere. They probably are not going to get hired at the New York Times right off. If many less prestigious news organizations are using fewer photojournalists, does that mean that the minor league for fledgling photojournalists is evaporating? I imagine many photojournalists work freelance. They will get a lot of work during a war, but what happens when the war is over? How many of them will still be able to make a steady living?
 
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I meant no disrespect. Please forgive me if it came across like that. I was referring to a foreign photo essay in America in the New York Times. People here are not seeing what you see only what is reported in these pictures. So while your views of the situation include everything, we get a particular view of actual events caused by censorship in Ukraine and bias on the part of NY Times photo editors who choose which photos to publish. That's the point I was trying to make about war photos.
 

bluechromis

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A major event like a war is going to skim off the most elite photojournalists. Elite news organizations that still use photojournalists like the New York Times will send staff there. Dramatic and excellent photos are coming out. This may superficially resemble what happened in WW 2 and Vietnam. But the exceptional circumstances may belie the reality that the context for photojournalism has drastically changed.

For one thing, the audience has changed. When I taught college classes I would ask my students how they learned about current events. Not one of them said they read a newspaper, watched television news or used any traditional news media. Some said they used comedy shows like The Daily Show, or radio talk shows. Some said they used social media. Some said they relied on friends to fill them in. A good chunk of them said they did nothing, they made no effort to learn about what was happening in the world.

This is very different than in the past when huge numbers of people read newspapers and Life Magazine and later watched TV news. In the past news media used pro-journalists. Many of you know the story that the first photos published of grim allied causalities in WW 2 taken by E. Smith and others had to be approved at the highest levels of government. But a lot of people saw those photos and it had a big effect on them.

Now, if the average person sees photographs of a war at all, it is just as likely to be amateur pic's randomly seen on social media. Yes, there are still elite war photographers that are doing great work. But their work, at least in the US, will disproportionally be seen by elite readers. The importance and centrality of journalism and photojournalism is far less in the US than it has been in the past. This raises the question of how much of a new generation of photojournalists can be sustained over time in this changed scenario.
 

KitosLAB

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Oh no no! I didn't mean disrespect! Forgive me if I gave reason to suspect this! I talked about what I see every day. I want to say that even when I see this car transporting the dead, I cannot force myself and get a camera out of my backpack in order to take pictures. I can only put it into words. And yes, I understand that in different countries the selection of photos for demonstration can take place in different ways.
 
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Crime photos as well as war photos are censored on the evening news and newspapers "to protect the viewers' sensitivities". I think this is a mistake. People should see and understand the violence in all its blood. Only then could they possibly gain a true understanding of these things. Whitewashing and eliminating the maim and mayhem only diminishes our caring about it.

"Next."
 

bluechromis

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It depends on how you look at that. The most graphic of crime and war photos may not be shared in the news. But news media is anything free of accounts of maythem, disasters, murders, wars, which are depicted with disturbing detail. The news is drenched with violent, traumatic, disturbing events. One study showed that over 80% of newstories in US on a issue were negative. The BBC coverage was only around 50% negative on the same subject. One could say they are just objectively depicting how the world is. But that's not remotely true. They ignore countless things that are more positive and important to understand current events. It presents, at best, a limited and distorted view of the world.

There is the rule that, "If dog bites man it's not news. But if man bites dog, that's news." This means the stories that are prioritized are ones that are both disturbing and odd. If a man kills his stepmother and grinds her body up in the disposal, news editors will say, "Perfect, that's our lead feature!" The story will disturb consumers, but is it useful to them to know about such a rare and peculiar event? Not really, it just upsets them to no purpose.

The problem is that for most media outlets, their goal is not to give consumers an objective understanding of the world. They have convinced themselves that sensationalism pays and brings in the most revenue. From their viewpoint, they are mostly in the business of entertainment, not education. There are indications that it is not true that sensationalism is good for business. Polls show that young people are abandoning traditional news media in droves. A major reason, they say, is because it is so negative and depressing.

As an example, my area of Oregon has experienced major forest fires that threatened populated areas in recent years. There were important things for citizens to know about fires such as whether it was approaching their area. But the TV news had features on fires six times a day, usually covering the same traumatic aspects over and over, like a little crying because her pony had burned up. This was overkill, there was no functional reason for people to be oversaturated with all that stuff. But the minute the fires ended, there was not one mention of them in the news. But there should have been because the fire threat was going to recur. There needed to be discussions all year about how to prevent fires in the future. But they won't do those stories because it isn't sensational enough. I finally saw one story on Public Television where they discussed strategies to address the root cause of fires, like excess fuels in the forests. That was one out of thousands of sensational reports.

People have a finite capacity to absorb traumatic stories. The media maxs that out largely on pointless subjects so that when there is something like Ukraine where they should know about it and feel empathy and try to help by donating to relief drives or something, they have nothing left. When people are overloaded, they become numb, and eventually, instead of feeling empathy, they are pissed to hear about the misery of others. When people are maxed out, even showing the most graphic war photos will not make them more empathetic or interested. It may do the opposite. You can blame the public for being apathetic and heartless, but they have been engineered to be that way by the media. In general, it can be stressful to have someone tell of their dire problems but have no way to help. It is the same with the news. If we show the public horrific images of Ukraine, there also ought information on how they can help, how they can actively support solutions and not just be a passive dumping site for sensational trauma.
 

Lee Rust

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I just retired after 50 years in the radio business, and looking back I'm very happy to be out of the entertainment media game. To me, it appears that the end is near for the mass media infrastructure that us older folks have always accepted as a normal part of life. The core audience is gradually fading away and the big broadcasters have resorted to desperate measures in order to attract enough aging eyes and ears to justify their advertising rates, resulting in the numbness and burnout which you describe. It can only go on for another decade or so before most of those recliners and easy chairs are empty. The younger generations get their information and stimulation in other ways and probably won't even notice when the last nightly TV news show finally goes away.
 
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Bluechromis and Lee: you both make good points. So what is the solution? First off, the news has always focused on the worse things that happened. That's not new. Should we reduce it? Post less photos of the mayhem.

If youngsters today don't care about traditional news, are they getting it differently andr if so aren't they affected by it similarly? After all people think, act and vote based on what they hear regardless of the source. I'm sure plenty of people have taken measures to reduce forest fires. And while w we may not be able to di anything personal regarding many issues, voters are taking positions on both sides of most issues.
 
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