HEY, I'M A JOURNALIST, TOO

by Ben Woodruff
Photography Editor, Rocky Mountain Collegian

From time to time I forget that I am a journalist. I get too into the photographer mode and forget the journalist part of photojournalist. When that happens I end up shooting pretty pictures that might or might not have anything to do with the story. Pretty pictures have their place, but often, content is more important. I must remember that the primary audience for the images I shoot are newspaper and magazine readers, most of whom are not photographers, and may not be as visually sophisticated as I am.

An example of this is the winning sports action photo from the Best of Photojournalism Contest, organized by the National Press Photographers Association and Poynter. The winning image depicts a swimmer in the English Channel. The image, shot wide, with a slow shutter speed for motion blur, fits better into the pretty picture category (that could be a new entry category for next year) than sports action. Is this the best photo from this event? Maybe. Is this the best sports action photo for the entire year? No. Pick ten photos that ran in the Leading Off section of Sports Illustrated, and at least one will be a better sports action photo. It will capture the decisive moment, not only of the play, but often of the entire game, or season.

©Benjamin J. Woodruff These three packets of sugar got me thinking about the different kinds of pictures that I shoot.

A good analogy for the different kinds of photos out there in photojournalism lies in the three types of sweetener found at my local coffee shop. The first, and my personal favorite is the unrefined, brown cane sugar. I liken this sugar to the outstanding raw documentary style work of Sebastiao Salgado, James Nachtwey, Eugene Richards, and others of that ilk.

It's not that these photographers don't have a style, on the contrary, each has a marvelous style, but each also produces images rich in content. I feel these photographers work is a good example of the fine balance between stylistically interesting images and those that have something to say. This kind of image is not for everyone, as much of this is too hard, too gritty, too deep for many, but it teaches something about the human condition, it shows the ultimate frailty of life.

©Benjamin J. Woodruff This is my best example of my own brown sugar photo. The thing I like best about this photo is how it gives me a feeling of being there, not just what being there looks like.

©Benjamin J. Woodruff This is one of my favorite photos, not because I made something decent out of a crappy light situation, but because I captured an intimate moment in an easy to read way. This falls into my refined white sugar group of photos.

Second, is the refined white azucar, the everyday stuff. This is the bread and butter of photojournalism, especially on the newspaper level. This kind of photojournalism is the straightforward news and sports that many of us shoot everyday.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this kind of image; in fact I think in its own way, they are the best photos I can shoot. This kind of photo, while, it may not be as stylistically interesting, is far easier for the reader to understand and digest. The average reader is only going to look at a photo for a few seconds before moving on, so to complete the job of telling the story, the image has to read quickly and easily.

Finally, there is the artificial sweetener. This correlates to the images I sometimes shoot that have no purpose outside of being pretty pictures. Be it rear curtain flash sync, gratuitous wide angle, silhouettes, etc., many images using these techniques end up pretty low on the content scale. A lot of feature photos fit into this category, which because of the nature of a feature, is fine, but sometimes I lose news and sports into this. When I lose news and sports, I am really doing a disservice to newspaper readers, because all I'm giving them is style and not content.

. ©Benjamin J. Woodruff While I like this photo, it really does fall into the artificial sweetener category of photo. It has an interesting look but I don't feel it is high on the content scale.

There is really no reason to make the news and sports, or even features, low calorie/content free, after all, I'd like to fatten up the readers, intellectually speaking. Usually I have pretty good visual acuity, and can pickup the point of the image pretty quickly, but looking through recent issues of my local newspapers, several images that anchor a page are so far out there that I don¹t get them without looking at them for the better part of a minute, far longer than any reader is going to.

The three main duties of my job are to accurately record what is going on, show people things they normally wouldn't see, and to educate them as to why they should care. I think that I can best do this by shooting the refined white sugar photos. Maybe someday I'll be able to work for a magazine like National Geographic, or work on my own books, at that point, I feel that more brown sugar is appropriate, because people make a conscious choice to look at those books or magazines, they really aren't as essential as newspapers.

An ex-girlfriend of mine couldn't understand why I could sit and look at books like "Inferno" by James Nachtwey, or "Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue" by Eugene Richards. For her, it seemed the images were too powerful, too rich in content, too in your face for her to view. She went so far as to say that my pictures were better than most of those in books like this. Technically, journalistically, and stylistically this isn't true, but it shows what an average Jane thought. It could be she only saw the photos on one dimension, rather than the multi-layered global importance of some of the brown sugar work. I look at this work not because I like death and starvation, but because it teaches me and grounds me. It shows me how good I have it as a college student en Los Estados Unidos.

Ben Woodruff
benjwoodruff@attbi.com