Photojournalism
Overview
Journalism
Journalism is the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues and trends to a broad audience in a timely fashion. Though there are many variations of journalism, the ideal is to inform the intended audience. Along with covering organizations and institutions such as government and...
(the collecting, editing, and presenting of news material for publication or broadcast) that creates images in order to tell a news story. It is now usually understood to refer only to still images, but in some cases the term also refers to video used in broadcast journalism. Photojournalism is distinguished from other close branches of photography
Photography
Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...
(i.e., documentary photography
Documentary photography
Documentary photography usually refers to a popular form of photography used to chronicle significant and historical events. It is typically covered in professional photojournalism, but it may also be an amateur, artistic, or academic pursuit...
, social documentary photography
Social documentary photography
Social documentary photography may be defined as the act of recording, with a camera, human beings in their natural condition. Often is also refers to a socially critical genre of photography dedicated to showing the life of underprivileged or disadvantaged people.-Origin of social documentary...
, street photography
Street photography
Street photography is a type of documentary photography that features subjects in candid situations within public places such as streets, parks, beaches, malls, political conventions and other settings....
or celebrity photography
Celebrity photography
Celebrity photography is a subset of photojournalism. Its subject matter is celebrities in the arts, sports and sometimes politics. There are three types of celebrity photography used by magazines and newspapers. They are:...
) by complying with a rigid ethical framework which demands that the work is both honest and impartial whilst telling the story in strictly journalistic terms. Photojournalists create pictures that contribute to the news media.
- Timeliness — the images have meaning in the context of a recently published record of events.
- Objectivity — the situation implied by the images is a fair and accurate representation of the events they depict in both content and tone.
- Narrative — the images combine with other news elements to make facts relatable to the viewer or reader on a cultural level.
Like a writer, a photojournalist is a reporter but he or she must often make decisions instantly and carry photographic equipment
Camera
A camera is a device that records and stores images. These images may be still photographs or moving images such as videos or movies. The term camera comes from the camera obscura , an early mechanism for projecting images...
, often while exposed to significant obstacles (i.e., physical danger, weather, crowds).
The practice of illustrating news stories with photographs was made possible by printing and photography innovations that occurred between 1880 and 1897.
