For most of this century and the last, professional photographers have documented our visual history. Now, in the age of digital cameras and mobile phones the role is increasingly falling to amateurs and 'citizen journalists'. Anthony McKee reflects on this fundamental shift and what it means for the future of photography.
It’s said that you don’t appreciate what you have until it's gone. That quote hit home for me over three years ago when my sister sent me a text message in the early hours of Saturday, September 4, 2010. The message was blunt: “Massive earthquake in Chch at 0430 this morning. No power. Absolutely terrifying but we are OK. Only minor damage here, but buildings down in the city."
A 7.1-magnitude earthquake had rocked my hometown of Christchurch, on New Zealand’s South Island, but as reports filtered through the media it became clear the city had dodged a bullet. There were no fatalities, and while some old brick buildings had collapsed in the central business district, most modern buildings had survived relatively unscathed. It was a miracle… God was looking after God’s own.
Sometimes, though, we are too quick to count our good fortunes. A few months later a second significant earthquake rocked the city, but unlike the slow rolling motion of the September quake, this 6.3-magnitude event was short and sharp. To compound the situation, the quake occurred during the lunchtime rush of a weekday, not the quiet of a Saturday morning. Workers in the city had little chance but to run for their lives or shelter under desks. Two relatively large buildings collapsed within moments of each other, trapping hundreds of people and initiating one of the largest rescue efforts in New Zealand’s modern history. A total of 185 souls died that afternoon, while 164 people were seriously hurt and another 1500 suffered minor injuries.
Two workers pause from the task of salvaging furniture and fittings from one of the old homesteads in Riccarton, Christchurch. Photo by Anthony McKee.
Overnight a cordon was established around four square kilometres of the CBD, a high fence was put up and soldiers from the New Zealand Army were tasked with keeping everybody out of the “Red Zone”, as the CBD soon became known. Residents, business owners and even the media were all denied access to the area for the next two years. It took weeks for the media to get their first look through the Red Zone following the disaster and when they did, they were confined to a bus as it drove a prescribed route. The government was being careful about what the media and its audience got to see.
Dozens of Christchurch photographers wanted to document the damage and the demolition for the sake of history but they too were denied access. Then one day a newspaper revealed a photographer from the National Library of New Zealand was documenting the disaster. At first this was good news, but soon it was revealed the photographer was a retired electrical engineer from Wellington on the North Island, who was commissioned to spend just four days every month in Christchurch. The self-taught, part-time photographer was known to library staff for taking photos at library conferences, which he usually attended with his wife, a parliamentary librarian.
Two years after the fateful earthquake I was one of several people interviewed for an eight-page feature story in a national magazine exposing the failings in the visual documentation of the earthquake. I also appeared in a television news program that questioned the National Library’s failure to put the job out to public tender.
By this stage though it was too late; 1500 buildings, or about 80 percent of the Christchurch CBD, had been demolished and sent to landfill, along with countless memories, visual stories and our only real chance to know what had happened to the city. What should have been one of the most well-documented natural disasters in recent history was only recorded to a relatively limited extent.
Why didn’t the National Library enlist the services of a professional photojournalist or documentary photographer to record such a significant event? Perhaps an even more important question is: has society forgotten the true value of photography in recording history?
In a city the public and photographers were forbidden to explore, insights into what actually might be happening were confined to glimpses through small windows or distant views from a fence-line. This view is of one of the historic shops on Hereford Street. Phot by Doc Ross, a fine-art photographer who has documented Christchurch and its people for over 15 years.
Ever since Joseph Niépce made a photograph out of his château window in France in 1826, the camera has become the defining process for capturing visual history. From the mid-to-late 1800s, photography provided Victorian society with its first real glimpse of foreign lands, cultures and even wars. The photographers of the era faced significant challenges; not only were their cameras large and their processes cumbersome, the low sensitivity (ISO) of early emulsions meant that subjects often had to stand still for several seconds to be photographed! Perhaps the biggest challenge photography had in the 1800s though, was that it simply could not reach large audiences.
That began to change in the early 1900s when newspapers began to perfect methods for including photographs onto the printed page. Soon the first news photographers were being employed to go out and illustrate stories.
It was in the 1930s though, that photography really began to define history. Twin lens reflex and 35mm cameras began replacing the massive wooden cameras that had burdened photographers for almost a century, and soon they were discovering a new freedom in their work. These small cameras were not only faster and easier to operate, they were also inconspicuous.
Photographers were finally able to explore environments and capture images without people stopping to stare. This was the beginning of modern documentary photography, and complementing this new age were the famous picture magazines, including Life and National Geographic.
At a time when television was still an expensive novelty, it was the picture magazines that showed the world to the masses. Documentary photographers were commissioned by magazines to explore countries and cultures, but rather than looking for the sensational, these photographers relied on a strong awareness of moment, context and narrative to see the stories within everyday life. The names of many photographers became famous in their time, but it is their photographs that endure today. Images like Margaret Bourke White’s portraits from the Great Depression, Robert Capa’s photos of World War Two’s D-Day landings and W. Eugene Smith’s photos of Japanese atomic bomb victims, are just some of photos which define many of the most significant events of the 20th Century. Their photographs often tell a story more succinctly than the written word could ever achieve.
Sadly though, while the 20th Century will be remembered as the information age, during which photojournalism and documentary photography flourished, the 21st Century could well be remembered as the century that we lost these two professions.
Documentary photographers and photojournalists are now struggling for survival in the digital world. As a profession, documentary photography has been struggling since the 1990s, when the classic picture magazines, including Life, began closing their doors. Good documentary photographers are still committed to shooting photo essays, but a lot of these projects are now self-funded, with no guarantee they will ever be published.
Magazines are still keen to publish the dramatic photo essays of fringe culture or life in war zones, but there is no longer much interest in the pure human-interest stories about ordinary communities. Newspapers have also struggled with television and radio over the years, but it’s the immediacy of digital photography and the internet that is now proving to be their biggest challenge. And while jobs have been cut right across the newspaper industry, it is the photojournalists who are now feeling the most concerned.
Ironically, photojournalists were the earliest adopters of digital photography at a time when 1.5-megapixel cameras were costing over $20,000 each, and one photo could take 30-minutes to send to the news desk using “dial-up” modems. Now though, everyone owns a digital camera, and anyone can upload a photo to the internet within seconds from almost anywhere in the world.
Rescue workers begin the grim job of searching through the Pyne Gould Corporation Building after it collapsed during the earthquake. Eighteen people lost their lives in this building, while one kilometre away 115 people lost their lives in the collapse of the CTV building. Photo by Tony Stewart, a Christchurch professional photographer who happened to be taking photos in the city on the day of the earthquake. Rather than staying to take photos in the moments after the first earthquake, Stewart jumped into his car and headed home to check his house and family.
The first photos we see from an accident or a disaster are often not captured by photojournalists, but by anybody who happens to arrive first. Anyone with a smartphone now qualifies as a photographer.
Magazines and newspapers are now relying on internet content and “citizen-journalists” for a large portion of their photography, and to understand why you only have to look at the number of photos being uploaded to the internet everyday. Facebook alone has 350 million photos added to its site every day, and publishers know this.
A lot of these photographs are personal, but if just one per cent of these photos are of other relevant subjects, and one percent of those were actually good photos, that still represents 35,000 photos a day being added to the internet which could possibly be publishable. Start adding in Flickr, Instagram and all the other social media sites and the actual amount of content online is unfathomable.
This raises huge questions about the future of professional photojournalism and documentary photography. For almost a century we have relied on these professional photographers to capture world history with clear vision and integrity, just as we have relied on the integrity of journalists to report honestly on our world. It seems incredible we can just replace the work of these highly trained photographers with random images from the internet, just as it would seem implausible to start replacing the work of journalists with Facebook posts and Tweets from complete strangers.
With billions of photos being added to the internet each week, another problem is also evolving. Photographers are now spending so much time looking at photos within their own networks that they are resetting the norms of what a good photograph should be. Rather than looking to the work of last century’s great reportage and documentary photographers, we are more likely to be looking at work of other enthusiasts somewhere in the world, and comparing our images with theirs. The benchmarks of good photography might not actually be going up any more, but down.
Complicating this is the fact that a large majority of photographers now feel compelled to set up photographs, or spend hours of time in post-production, hoping that clever effects will turn an average photo into an award-winning one. We have become self-focused on creating hyper-realities. This is not just happening at the amateur photography level either.
Anyone looking through the winning work from last year’s Australian Professional Photography Awards (the APPAs) or its New Zealand equivalent will have noticed the large proportion of photographs which are contrived. Some of these images are often the result of hours or even days of work, both in the set-up and in post-production. The reason professional photographers make these photos is because nowadays, this is what their clients want; everyone wants to be more beautiful and glamorous than they actually are. Even advertising clients know that a straight photograph is not enough to sell a product anymore; photographers and art directors are now styling their images to perfection – and beyond.
Looking at these images, the general public probably believes that most professional photographers cannot produce a good straight photograph anymore, and to some extent they might be right! Want proof of this? Take a look at the one category in the professional photography awards where photographers are required to enter a straight shot… the photojournalism category. Last year, the judges of the New Zealand awards decided not to choose a category winner, simply because the overall standard of work wasn’t strong enough. Is it any wonder then, that after a New Zealand newspaper published a story about the National Library’s coverage of the Christchurch earthquake, some members of the public suggested an amateur was probably better suited for documenting the disaster than a professional?
I don’t buy that argument, but I do believe that nowadays too many photographers have lost – or in many cases never gained – the ability to "see" the visually sophisticated, storytelling photographs.
I have long believed the old adage that “fact is stranger than fiction”, and as such I believe that if a photographer looks hard enough, or applies enough patience to a situation, they will often find photographs with more power and integrity than any photo which can be contrived for the camera. It’s an approach fundamental to good photojournalism and documentary photography, and I think it is a skill set that photographers really need to start embracing and celebrating again.
Why? Because nowadays everyone has a camera, and everyone is capable of taking a photo. The one thing digital cameras do not give people though, is the ability “see” good photos, just as new laptops don’t actually help people write award-winning novels. And the notion that Photoshop and other clever filters can turn a bad photo into a good photo is no different to book publishers hoping bad books can be made into good books by giving readers rose-coloured glasses. Digital photography might have changed the world, but the rules of good photography remain the same.
A tent set up in Hagley Park for the Ellerslie Flower Show was commandeered immediately after the earthquake to become an emergency clearing centre for tourists, backpackers and central city residents displaced from their homes and accommodation when the cordon was placed about the city. Photo by Tony Stewart.
No matter how much money people throw at photography, there is no buying the raw ability to see the photos that tell stories, and to anticipate the critical moments that make those photographs powerful. That ability to see a photograph in the moment, and not in the hour or the week, is what should make good photographers, and their work, stand out from everyone else. It’s the skill-set that documentary photographers have relied on for the better part of a century, and it will remain essential if stills photographers want to continue doing justice to our visual history.
This month I will be going home to Christchurch for a holiday, and as I walk about the city, I am going to be reflecting on old acquaintances who died in the earthquake and familiar buildings that are no longer standing. I am also going to be acutely aware of the missing photos from the city’s visual history. Some are the photos that I should perhaps have taken while I still lived in the city, and others are the photos that were not made in the aftermath of the city’s disaster.
What I think is important for every photographer to remember though, is that what happened in Christchurch can, and does happen to other towns and communities around New Zealand and Australia, and indeed the world. Every year bushfires, floods and the occasional cyclone decimate communities, and as they do they erase visual history in the process. If we do not open our eyes and begin to realise the value of the ordinary in our lives, the visual stories that occur in our communities, the visual history that is sitting just around the corner, then there is a good chance that one day it won’t be there any more and we will have lost an opportunity to tell their story.
Rather than waiting for professional photographers to start capturing your local visual history, I think every photographer with any sense of social responsibility, or even just a feeling for the passing of time, should start taking another look at the community they live in, and recording the places and the people. Rather than just taking the obvious photos though, give thought to looking for the moments and the narratives. Give buildings context and people personalities; reveal your town’s stories.
We need to learn to seize the moment again and see the meaningful photos about us, because as they say, sometimes you don’t appreciate what you have until you lose it. ❂
Anthony McKee grew up in Christchurch and moved to Australia in 2002. He was denied access to the Red Zone in May of 2012. However, the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority granted him permission to spend two hours in the zone in September 2012.
A car on Barbadoes Street does its best to support the weight of a wall and tile roof following the Christchurch earthquake. Photo by Tony Stewart.