Archive for September 2nd, 2008
‘Slow News Day’
Jon Anderson writes:
This is the problem with current methods of telling and distributing our journalistic stories. Our methods are disjunctive, piecemeal, choppy, reductive, and formally inconsequential. We furnish bites and bulletins rather than stories with sufficient body to make it worth our readers’ while to stop and absorb their meaning. We fail to provide meaningful, comprehensive and inventive structure capable of contextualizing the violence and the heartbreak in a way that redeems that content and makes it compelling, rather than just another journalistic cliché – just another skeletal child with flies in its eyes – that either repels or bores the viewer. If we take care to create narratives as compelling as those we flock to see at the cinema, then I see no reason why we cannot count in the future on people to solicit our material, download it, and pay us for it.
From Lightstalkers. I entirely agree with everything he says and as a photography student about to enter the world it lays down the coming change, something all photographers will come across soon enough, especially during a time when the economy is slowing down. I don’t want to go back to Tesco after I graduate, I want to ‘do’ photography and earn my living. Something I noted is that communications are speeding up, not slowing down. Who will make the time to digest (buy) such stories if this happens? The question remains how do I and other photographers get there.
