What is photojournalism anyway?
As I wrote earlier, “I often see discussions about why certain photographers are members of Magnum when, in fact, ‘in reality’ they’re fine-art photographers.” Just this morning, I received an email where a friend told me that the work of a certain photographer was in fact not what Magnum was all about. I don’t want to get into the Magnum soul searching that appears to be going on (should you believe the word in the street). What I want to argue, instead, is that if we take Magnum as a place where you can get photojournalism then the presence of people like, for example, Mark Power (great post, if you haven’t seen it!) shows that it’s not a good idea to define photojournalism too narrowly. Just like print journalism, there’s a large variety of what people can do. There are people who spend an afternoon at the scene of a bank robbery, and there are people who spend a few months undercover, working menial jobs to see if you can get by if your job is with Walmart or Target. Those are two
