Photojournalism

Abstract

The story of photojournalism is inextricably linked with humankind’s desire to understand the meaning of life itself. Photojournalism means visual reporting. At first read, that definition seems clear. When coined in the mid-20th century, photojournalism referred primarily to news photography: still photographs of significant or interesting events and people published in newspapers and magazines along with verbal reports or brief explanatory captions. As journalistic media expanded to include video and audio, first in analog form and then in digital form, such word combinations as visual journalism, visual reportage, and multimedia journalism gained popularity as inclusive concepts to describe the different forms visual reporting might take. Further complicating the challenge to photojournalism researchers is the need to explore literature related to visual evidence; such complex epistemological and methodological issues as representation and reality; and the impact of media on culture and society. Scholarship across the disciplines sometimes addresses photojournalism directly and almost always can inform the study of photojournalism: in art the History and criticism of photography and film in all their forms, both realistic and expressionistic; in English and comparative literature images as texts; in philosophy theories of Aesthetics, ways of knowing, and perception; and in social and natural sciences psychology of perception, eye and brain, behavior, anthropology, folklore, popular culture, and environmental science. Scholarship exploring photojournalism specifically often focuses on one or more parts of the dynamic of visual communication: the image maker (photographer, videographer, graphic novelist, editor, designer); who or what is imaged (person, moment, event, place, era, social issue); how the image is managed and distributed (editing, design, platform, marketing, archiving); or how the image is viewed and remembered (viewer, audience, receiver, eye, brain). Ranging from such practical concerns as tracking the movement of a viewer’s eyes across the elements of a newspaper page to such complex issues as the nature of reality or how memory alters what we perceive and believe, a growing body of literature has enhanced knowledge of the role of visual reportage in mediating, influencing, or even creating public perception of and response to people, events, and issues near and far. Although this annotated bibliography seeks to cover the range of work significant to the study of photojournalism, by definition as a selection of work it cannot be comprehensive.