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Photojournalism and its crisis.
What does the future hold for photojournalism? I have been asked during seminars, lessons on photojournalism, by friends, photographers and rival agencies, both amicable and not. I am not rational. I have always acted on impulse in everything I do. A swift and logical decision between passion and rationality. I believe that photojournalism is not dead but it is definitely in the midst of a serious crisis, and great photo documentation will suffer as a result. The lack of demand, the low daily rate, low selling price for the service, the lack of copyright protection (which appeared to be at its best at the end of the 80s), the serious crisis that has hit the small independent agencies (the sole producers of great quality and historical documentation), the impossibility of finding personnel who know how to combine love of photography with an interdisciplinary culture, the small number of people capable of looking at photos and giving them economic, formal and content value, publishers with a thirst for profit who have been creating problems with photo editors who are now seen as the enemies of photographers instead of the sole friendly interlocutors, our weak labor contract, the market which privileges speed and money saving over quality, grumbling photographers, news publications transformed into fitness and cosmetics journals, services requested by agencies which no longer look at the creativity of the shoot, and the interruption of long and fascinating dialogues between agencies to defend the photojournalistic dream above all from the dreaded but useful term "business and practice'.
An interesting view from someone in the field.
Posted on February 14, 2005
in Limit of my knowledge
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