One of the issues that got attention late in 2013 was photographers’ access to the president and the White House in general. Photographers covering President Obama became more active in their protests of being excluded from covering events involving the president. During both Obama administrations, many events involving the president have been covered by White House photographer Pete Souza. Photographs have then been distributed to media organizations and posted on the White House flickr account. To their credit, the White House communication staff has provided more photographs than preceding administrations, but it’s the official view.

So what’s the difference? Does it matter who takes a picture of the president meeting with the speaker of the House? Or a diplomat from another country? Photographers and reporters don’t get to sit in on the meetings anyway, and the picture session is pretty predictable. Does it matter whether the picture is made by a photojournalist working for a news organization or a photographer working for the White House as long as the public gets to see it?

For the photographers, and media in general, the issue is one of independently witnessing the activities involving the elected leader of the country. When the president meets other politicians or dignitaries or takes part in events, those who routinely cover the president want to witness and record the activities and share the images with the public. The desire reflects the role media has played as independent witnesses/recorders of government. Without that independent witness, there’s no accountability for the information that’s distributed. With no other photographs to depict the moment, there’s no way to know whether the official photographs are reflective of the reality of the event.

I’m a little dismayed that this became an issue at the end of 2013. I’m not dismayed because of the issue, I’m dismayed that the practice is still going on this far into President Obama’s second term. The practice of excluding photographers and distributing pictures made by the White House photographer started on the day of his first inauguration. To be fair though, attention to image control has increased throughout the last century and into this one. Photographers and reporters had more access to FDR, but there were rules about how he could be photographed. Eisenhower decreased access in his second term. JFK didn’t change access as much as he just didn’t present himself to the cameras until he was ready. An official in the Nixon administration coined the phrase “photo opportunity.” Reagan’s team was extremely attentive to controlling access and the angles photographers would have, and successive administrations have expanded the practices.

So it’s not just the current photographers and the current administration. It’s something that’s been an issue for decades to some degree. Is it important? I believe so. I can understand the perspective of those who question whether it matters that multiple photographers get to record politicians meeting. How many different pictures from roughly the same position do we need to see? The answer is, more than one. Partially because the existence of multiple photographs supports veracity of any one, or calls into question those that don’t quite match up. But more importantly, every additional restriction on access to seemingly innocuous events like official greetings opens the door to restrictions to other events. How long is it before access to official events is restricted? At what point is the public left with only the official version of events? That’s the real issue. And that’s why news organizations have to push back and work to regain access to show the public the activities of their leaders.

Keeping up with posting took a backseat to end-of-semester grading and such. The vision persists. The goal is to address it on a more regular basis. Check back soon.

In the meantime, Happy New Year.

There is somewhat depressing news from the Pew Research Center about the state of newspaper photography staffs. Well, depressing if you value them or are on one anyway.

It’s not news that newspapers are cutting back on staff. Jobs have been disappearing fairly rapidly since about 2005, affecting reporters, editors and visual journalists. Jobs for reporters really started to decline around 2005, while other categories have been more steady. As with many things though, how you look at it makes a big difference.

The Pew report includes a chart of data from the American Society of News Editors. The graph shows a pretty big decline in the number of reporting jobs, but the overall difference is a -32% change. There were a lot more reporting jobs than other categories, and there still are. The number of visual jobs started much lower, at 6,171 in 2000, and it has dropped to 3,493 in 2012. That’s a difference of -43%. So while the graph looks flatter, photography jobs have taken the hardest hit in the newsroom.

The article notes that in some cases photographers are some of the longest-serving newsroom veterans, so cutting those jobs yielded the biggest savings. But in other cases the belief that reporters or citizens can produce photographs is playing a role. And that’s where the bad news comes in terms of quality visual reporting. I’m not saying only professional photographers can make a good photograph, but people trained in visual communication can more regularly produce images that communicate depth. That should be something newspapers, and other media outlets, care about if they believe in an informed public.

You can read the article on the Pew Research Center site.

(By the way, I know I may be carrying this “vision” theme a little to far by incorporating it in every post. It won’t last forever.)

I saw a persistent vision yesterday.

The Missouri School of Journalism awarded its Honor Medal to Carol Guzy, longtime photojournalist at the Washington Post. Carol is the only journalist of any discipline to receive 4 Pulitzer Prizes. She was the first woman named Newspaper Photographer of the Year in the Pictures of the Year International competition, an award she has claimed three times.

As part of her visit to campus, Carol spoke to a combined group of classes in the afternoon, talking about her career and presenting a slide show of stories she has done. Her career has taken her to locations as varied eastern Europe as Communist governments collapsed, to Colombia following mudslides, to Haiti before and after earthquakes and to her own town. She’s documented social change, coping with disaster and caring between humans. One of Carol’s stories was about an elderly woman caring for her older sister. Another was about animals that had to be left behind as people were evacuated from New Orleans before and after Katrina.

Yet with all that range of content, from peaceful or violent revolution to innocent beings caught in a situation not of their own making, there is consistency. All the pictures capture emotion, dignity, spirit. One student said that to look at Carol’s photographs is to feel what the people in the pictures felt.

That, my friends, is a persistent vision.

There is an exhibit of Carol’s work in the gallery of the Angus and Betty McDougall Center for Photojournalism Studies. It’s on the lower floor of Lee Hills Hall at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. If you find yourself in or near Columbia, Mo., in the next few weeks, check it out.

I recently made my first visit to New Orleans. While attending a conference I had the opportunity to slip away and see an exhibit at the New Orleans Museum of Art that reminded me that while everyone has a vision… a way of seeing the world and imagining what it could be… the vision we want to communicate is not always the vision others receive from us.

For photojournalists, that conflict is inherent in their craft. Their vision is not just an internal voice; it shapes the images they make. In our contemporary environment, photojournalists can take that vision directly to an audience. Sometimes, however, their vision is altered by others who have a different vision to present to an audience.

Such has been the case with magazine photographers, including those whose work appeared in LIFE magazine throughout most of the last 2/3 of the 20th century. LIFE’s readers saw the moments the photographers captured, but not necessarily as the photographer saw them or even the full range of what the photographer captured. Readers saw the end result, left to believe that it reflected the photographer’s vision and to consider whether they agreed, or perhaps disagreed, with the vision.

That’s what makes the NOMA exhibit so unique. “Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument” focuses on a 1948 photo essay called “Harlem Gang Leader.” Curator Russell Lord has put together an exhibit that simultaneously communicates Parks’ vision and LIFE’s vision.

It was Parks’ first photo essay for LIFE. Parks gained the trust of the leader of one particular gang and then the rest of the members. Over a couple of weeks Parks got to know the gang members and made photographs of their activities from painting the bicycles they rode around on to hiding from a rival gang. In the case of the leader, Leonard “Red” Jackson, Parks also photographed quieter moments of home life with Jackson’s mother and siblings.

The exhibit shows photographs from the LIFE essay, and it features the pages from the November 1, 1948, issue where they appeared. The exhibit goes further into the editorial creation process though. Alongside the published photographs visitors can see the contact sheets that show the other frames Parks made, some complete with grease pencil marks to identify frames to print and how they should be cropped. Visitors can see that what appears to be a tight shot of two gang members fighting is just part of a frame taken from farther away that shows other members and more accurately communicates Parks’ position in relation to the action. Visitors can see how the prints were given more exposure in some areas and less in others to focus attention on details of a frame. Visitors can also see how the photographs in LIFE that focus on the gang and the tough street life of Harlem are just a part of the vision Parks saw of Jackson’s life.

It’s a reminder that everyone has a vision, but those visions occur within a broader cultural/societal context. Sometimes we edit our vision before it’s shared and other times the vision is edited by others. It’s worth remembering before concluding that someone has missed the picture, so to speak, that it might not be that person’s picture we’re really seeing.

It’s also worth the time to see this exhibit if your find yourself in New Orleans before January 12, 2014. Until then, you can read more about the exhibit on the NOMA website.

Through the 1930s when the Resettlement Administration/Farm Security Administration photography project was in full swing it was under constant attack by Congress. Not only did a faction of Congress oppose the social programs FDR implemented, including the agricultural programs, they also didn’t want photographers making pictures of the programs. Various initiatives to defund or otherwise thwart the program were unsuccessful until after the FSA became the Office of War Information in the 1940s.

It looks like the current Congress has succeeded where its predecessors in the 1930s couldn’t. As part of the federal government shutdown of October 2013, the Library of Congress is closed, both in DC and online. All those photographs in the library’s file and digitized on the website? Inaccessible.

I guess they move slowly, but they eventually get what they want.

Photographs are often considered to have power, as in “That’s the power of photographs,” or “Photographs have the power to….” There’s even a book called The Power of Photography. If you’ve read previous posts or the about page, you know I have a belief in the ability of photographs to communicate. While I have strong feelings that photographs can be powerful, I stop short of believing in a universal effect. There are just too many variables. For some people a photograph can be very influential, while for other people the same picture hardly gets noticed.

One thing I am sure of, however, is that while a photograph might have a future impact, it can’t change what happened in the frame. That moment is captured, and nothing’s going to change what’s there.

I was thinking about that more after reading a NY Times Lens blog post about Don McCullin. McCullin’s been a favorite of mine for a long time. McCullin photographed conflict and suffering around the world before leaving it behind to photograph landscapes around Bath, England.

My younger self admired McCullin’s drive and and determination to be at the world’s hot spots. Like many young journalists, being in the middle of the action was something to aspire to. As I’ve gotten older, I can understand why McCullin decided it was time to move away from that work. In the blog post McCullin is quoted from a presentation at the Visa Pour l’Image festival in Perpignan, France. McCullin talked about standing in front of men who were about to be executed, having them look at him and hoping he could stop the events, or starving children thinking he could bring food. While there may have been some long-term impact, and McCullin suggests that’s debatable, the photograph didn’t change the events that are captured within it. It can’t change what happened at that moment.

So what does that mean? Well, despite my persistent vision that photographs can communicate in ways words can’t and that visual journalism is valuable, it’s important to remember there are limits. But that doesn’t mean photographers should shy away from making the tough pictures. There’s too much “dumbing down” of media already. There’s plenty in the world to lift spirits, but there’s plenty that people would rather turn away from too. We need to see those things we’d rather turn away from. McCullin said in the presentation that photojournalists haven’t changed a thing. That may be. For all the hopes photographers have had for their pictures, the big picture of human activity hasn’t changed a whole lot. But if we don’t see the things that need to be changed, it’s guaranteed that nothing will change.

I was looking at National Geographic on my iPad this past week when I got notification that a new edition was available. The October 2013 edition cover presents it as The Photo Issue. There is a lot to look at in the issue, but I was struck by the subtitle of the article titled Visual Village. It says Now We’re All Photographers.

The article is written by James Estrin, co-editor of the Lens photography blog at The New York Times. In it he points out that with “the explosion of camera apps on our smartphones, we’re all photographers.” He goes on to write in the article that this new ease of photography results in capturing the magical as well as the mundane, and he refers to the “democratization of photography” brought about by this digital revolution.

I had to keep reminding myself I was reading about 2013, because a lot of the points Estrin makes were made more than 100 years earlier when George Eastman introduced the Kodak. Eastman’s exhortation to push the button while “we do the rest,” made photographers out of average citizens. In a short time, photography went from something requiring skill and training to be successful to something that required little more than the funds to purchase a camera, point it and press a button. And the content changed. There were cries over the dumbing down of photography and leveling the ordinary and extraordinary. In some respects the criticism is valid, but look at what we got to see that we wouldn’t otherwise have, and look at what the public came to expect would be recorded: the evidence of lives like those most of us experience on a daily basis. From there we get to here, where people with their smartphone cameras can capture the things they see, and we get to sort out what’s important.

So what’s the point? Well, while technology changes the impact it has on society and culture follows patterns. As a history teacher/researcher, I have to admit a bit of bias, but we would do well when new technologies cause new concerns to take a look back and see if it’s really going to be as new and different as we think.

What is a persistent vision?

It’s a physical phenomenon, and it’s a philosophy. The physical phenomenon is known more properly as persistence of vision. It’s the phenomenon that explains how a series of still photographs can appear to be a moving picture. The brain sees the still pictures with slight differences and connects them logically to suggest motion. Motion pictures rely on this phenomenon so that a series of still pictures projected at a rate of 24/second can look like smooth motion. It works with flip books too. So with each frame there’s a persistent vision.

As a philosophy, a persistent vision suggests one that continues to exist over a prolonged period. The environmental/cultural factors may change, but the vision remains. It persists.

I work in a visual communication field, teaching and conducting research primarily related to photojournalism. Walter Williams, first dean of the University of Missouri School of Journalism, set forth his vision of journalism in The Journalist’s Creed. In that spirit, I offer my persistent vision:

I have a persistent vision…

• that pictures communicate in ways that words cannot.
• that visual documentation of events is an essential part of the public and historical record.
• that photographers/videographers/designers are skilled communicators using specialized tools and methods of communication.
• that visual journalism is valuable and deserves support from the industry and the public.

That is my persistent vision. I recognize its idealistic nature. The real world often conflicts with the points in my vision, but without idealism there is little to strive for. So in a world where newspapers lay off entire photography staffs, where anyone with a camera can share photographs with the world and where people think anything on the internet is free to use, my vision for vision communication will persist. I may not change attitudes, but I will continue to hold fast to my vision.

That’s the perspective I’ll take in this blog. I’ll share topics related to visual communication, and I’ll comment on them. And through it, you’ll know my persistent vision.