Photojournalism Research Paper

Mitchell Anthony Reyes
Professor Timothy Welch
English 101
08 December 2014
Photojournalism: Stronger than words Every event that happens in every part of the world is covered by some type of media. Whether that media would be a news television show, public blog, social websites, newspapers, magazine articles, etc. there are always ways to find information about the happenings of the present. However, as news in detail is conveyed in words, spoken or written, many don’t truly understand what is going on in the event that they are finding out about. Throwing out written or verbal descriptions and making the reader or listener imagine the event in their head sometimes just doesn’t cut it and causes generalization. This is why media utilizes photojournalism, to further captivate what is going on. These huge pictures on the front page of every newspaper is what peaks the interest of readers, if not the headline first. Although, readers can even misanalyse published photos on the media. Show a reader a picture of a dead white American child, and the reader can say the paper is unpatriotic. Media within itself is always a delicate matter to be handled with, especially when photojournalism is included. That being said, should photojournalism be used for the public media? Yes, photojournalism, if utilized correctly, can definitely help. Photojournalism should be utilized for any story covered by the media. Photojournalism brings an element of emotion to play with media stories. Yes, utilizing adjectives and such to bring across the point of something that should be viewed as sad or happy is what any journalist should do, but that can’t be that effective. Leaving the images of a disaster or a celebration to one’s imagination can be tricky and can cause a misinterpretation of events. “Stories may whisper with nuance and headlines declaim in summary, but pictures seize the microphone, and if they’re good, they don’t let go” (Okrent 3). Pictures captivate the emotion within the story. Reading a story about a disaster and not having any photos to view keeps the reader at a more general-like, non-chalant emotion. One certain hurricane, tornado, earthquake, etc. isn’t the first that most readers have heard about. It’ll be habitual to think about the disaster in a very generalized sense. “As a society, we’ve acquired an immunity to crisis. We scan through headlines without understanding how stories impact people, even those we love. Junk news melds with actual emergencies, to the point that we can’t gauge danger anymore” (Knufken 2). People have already read about disasters, so seeing the same words such as “high-speed winds, destruction, etc.” doesn’t cause much of a reaction out of them. However, reading the same story with a single photo of a grieving mother holding her dead child can change the emotion of the piece altogether. This happened with The Times after the tidal wave disaster in Sri Lanka. The news company, after reviewing more than 900 images of the devastation, decided to publish their article with a photo that showed a row of lifeless children, with what looks like a grieving mother on her knees. Daniel Orkent, an author of the New York Times, asked “managing editor Jill Abramson why she chose this picture. She said in an e-mail message that after careful and difficult consideration, she decided that the photo ‘seemed to perfectly convey the news: the sheer enormity of the disaster…It is an indescribably painful photograph, but one that was in all ways commensurate to the event’” (2). Photojournalism also can shift the opinion of a reader. Every reader is entitled to their own opinion on what media photos they think should be published. Showing lifeless children or terrorists shooting a marine may be too graphic. But instead of showing those photos and showing photos of smiling children that survived a disaster or soldiers that are relaxing with some R & R may cause too much relief. This makes photojournalism even

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