What is a Photojournalist?

What is a photojournalist?

A journalist tells stories. A photographer takes pictures of nouns (people, places and things). A photojournalist takes the best of both and locks it into the most powerful medium available - frozen images.

Photojournalists capture "verbs." This sounds simple, but a room of professional photographers was dumbfounded by this realization. Even after a full-length lecture with documentation and visual evidence, half of the photographers still had no clue what the difference was.

At the end of the presentation. One man said (he really did), "So, what's the difference between photography and photojournalism?" Luckily, two people (only two) turned to him and yelled, "Verbs!"

Although photojournalists can take properly exposed and well composed photographs all day long, they hunt verbs. They hunt them, shoot them and show them to their readers. Then, they hunt more.

A photojournalist has thousands of pairs of eyes looking over his shoulder constantly. The readers are insistent: "What are they doing?" "What did you see?" and "What happened?".

The readers wake PJs up at night. They keep PJs awake. The eyes always want to know what they missed. Readers can't see what they missed with a noun. It works if the question is specific enough (what did the condemned building look like?), but most answers require verbs.

To tell a story, a sentence needs a subject, a verb and a direct object. News photos need the same construction. Photojournalists tell stories with their images. Also, words are always used in conjunction with photojournalist's images.

The words below a photo are called a cutline. I write the cutlines that go with most of my images. At many newspapers, photographers provide names and nothing else. They don't write cutlines because they sometimes can't write a lead (lede) graph for a story. They also may not be able to photograph a sentence (sports being the exclusion, and there are plenty of supporting images to prove my point in this genre as well).

To be a photojournalist, we must understand the relationship between the image and these basic elements of language (all languages - worldwide).

The girl hits (or misses) the ball. There are no other options.

The girl is easy to photograph. The ball is easy to photograph. The verb is the hard part.

As a servant of the citizens, it's the photojournalist's OBLIGATION to capture the entire sentence involved in EVERY event. There are no excuses. It's hit or missed. Some photographers don't care. They have a picture of the bat. "Hey, that's what tried to hit the ball." They just don't get it.