Thinking about photojournalism:
Theory and practice provide clues to the future
of the profession

Review by James D. Kelly

Indiana University

Photojournalism and Today's News: Creating Visual Reality, by Loup Langton. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. ISBN: 9781405178969. 250 pp.

There are photojournalism books that tell you how you can do photojournalism and those that tell you how someone else did photojournalism. Rare is the book that helps you think about photojournalism. Loup Langton’s is one of those rare books.

And this is a good time to think about photojournalism. Traditional print media is losing readers and advertisers at the same time that digital camera technology is making it easy for anyone to make quality photographs. The demand for photojournalism from traditional venues declines while the supply from modern technology increases. Economic theory says that is bad news for people who have made their living as photojournalists.

The death of photojournalism has long been forecast, but has yet to pass. There is no doubt that dramatic change has taken place over the past few decades—in technique, practice and the impact on journalism writ large. But certain fundamental theoretical constructs have remained constant and influential, even if not fully acknowledged by photojournalists themselves or the other journalists they work with. Langton lays out several key factors influencing photojournalism today and uses them to analyze the current condition and forecast the future.

Langton is well qualified to examine these theoretical constructs and how they explicate the dynamics of photojournalism and today’s news. His professional experience is as solid as his academic credentials. He was an award-winning editor and director of photography at some of the most innovative visual papers in the U.S., and he holds a doctoral degree in mass communication. His dissertation was about photojournalism and the social construction of reality.

These complementary perspectives—professional and academic—are evident throughout the book. At times the text reads as if a newsroom coach is advising how to manage people and resources to improve product while at other times Langton sounds like a French philosopher waxing learnedly about the nature of culture.

His primary contention is that “photojournalists become successful by consistently providing photographic symbols that portray a reality similar to the reality of top editors.” This analysis rests on an assumption that reality and truth are culturally specific and time bound rather than universal. Langton argues that newsroom routines, power relationships, and various other traditions create a culture that subtly but consistently elicits a visual set of symbols that ultimately reflect the economic demands of corporate owners. The critique is well argued and firmly rooted in the work of Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Arthur Asa Berger and other philosophers and semioticians who have looked critically at visual mass media.

A short history of photojournalism starts the book and provides context for the three primary factors Langton says are important in understanding the current situation. First, newsroom culture largely defines what news is at a particular point in time and those decisions reflect the dominant ideology. Two, corporate ownership of the mainstream media has steadily narrowed the range of acceptable definitions of news and increased the influence of commercial interests on the news. And three, objectivity as a philosophical ideal has more to do with limiting diverse viewpoints that obtaining the larger truth that all professional journalists seek to discover.

These three factors are further developed and illustrated in a series of chapters that mix the very pragmatic advice of a photo director with the careful analysis of a scholar. In “The Visual Newsroom,” Langton describes how he and others made papers better by empowering photographers and advocating for the role of photos as legitimate stories and photojournalists as equal peers with text reporters. This chapter pairs with his chapter on “Newsroom Culture and Routines,” which provides more analysis than advice on essentially the same set of relationships. Both rely heavily on his own personal accounts as well as the reflections of dozens of prominent journalists whom Langton has worked and interviewed.

The next three chapters are similarly linked. “Construction of Reality” lays out a theoretical analysis of the way news is defined and produced. Then chapters on “Economics” and “Ethics” expand and illustrate the key constructs through numerous examples. The strongest aspect of the narrative is that Langton combines his own experiences with those of so many others. The text is infused with personal interviews Langton conducted with more than seventy highly regarded journalists in the U.S. and Latin America. Visually literate publishers like John Temple of the Rocky Mountain News and John Carroll of the Los Angeles Times contribute insightful commentary, as did picture editors like Tom Kennedy and Maggie Steber and photographers like Rob Finch, Michel duCille, and Scott Strazzante. All chapters blend theory and practice—sometimes theory predicts and practice illustrates and at other times practice is described and theory is used to analyze.

Indeed, the book’s greatest strength and its single shortcoming is this dual approach. According to the publisher, the intended audience is “students and young professionals.” The book is pitched appropriately enough. The practical advice and lessons about best practices will be exceptionally valuable to anyone—student or recent graduate—who wants to improve and succeed in the profession of photojournalism. The “Relationships” chapter about the way photographers interact with their subjects should be required reading in every college journalism course, photo or not. And the theoretical discussions will surely stimulate deeper thought about the role photojournalist play in the newsroom and the role the newsroom plays in the greater society. But because of the level at which the book is pitched, the theoretical discussion is insufficiently critiqued. A through critique would be a lot to ask of a volume as slim as 250 pages, but just as newsroom routines and journalistic assumptions ought rightly be called into question, so too ought theoretical notions posited by scholars with little to no actual experience in journalism practice. Perhaps Langton’s next book will allow him to provide a theoretical critique based on his many years inside journalism.

The book tells a story about photojournalism that starts just before the invention of the halftone and ends just as it evades its death yet again. He describes a long history of photographs usage slowly transitioning from illustration of text to visual documentation. Langton bemoans the decreasing amount of space devoted to photography of substance and the increasing use of visuals as packaging. He sees the coming of the Internet as a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it enables greater diversity of perspective. Where a small number of newspapers and magazines once controlled the news, the World Wide Web allows virtually anyone to publish. On the other hand, the Internet magnifies the petty and mundane and is increasingly dominated by the same multimedia conglomerates that so thoroughly control the mainstream media. Nevertheless, Langton is quite bullish on the future of photojournalism believes that a new media ownership model is coming where more emphasis is placed on public service responsibility. Using the theoretically grounded and professionally tested lessons he provides, photo editors and photojournalists ought to be better able to assume an integral place in those new news operations.

In the end, the Langton’s argument is that while journalism as we have known it for several decades now is transitioning into an unknown future, “photojournalism is perfectly positioned to the take the lead in a new kind of journalism that does a better job of … giving a more ‘truthful, comprehensive, and intelligent account of the day’s events in a context that gives them meaning.’”