<![CDATA[Photographer Roger P. Watts

<![CDATA[Photographer Roger P. Watts - Blog]]>Fri, 01 Mar 2024 17:54:29 -0600Weebly<![CDATA[Literally...an assault on freedom of the press...]]>Sun, 17 Jan 2021 01:59:10 GMThttp://rogerpwatts.com/blog/literallyan-assault-of-freedom-of-the-press

This video shows Associated Press photographer John Minchillo - dressed for war in black and gas mask - being physically attacked by rioters during the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th.

John is one of the country's great news photographers. His bravery in the face of riots, rebellions, marches, and protests is unparalleled. I've written about him before because of his incredible images during the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis.

The attack on him came about because, as you see, he is in the very mouth of the beast. He stays inside the danger. He always faces both the angry mob and the angry police. He has absorbed blows and gas before, but never what could easily have become a threat to his life. This is the kind of behavior you see journalists endure in war zones, in banana republic coups, and in civil wars in Balkan countries. You don't usually see this in the US.

Or do you?

In August 1982 I was a journeyman photojournalist in Washington DC working the freelance beat and covering whatever I could to make a buck and make it big. I covered many demonstrations during the few years after the Reagan election. There was one march by the Klu Klux Klan to commemorate the 20th anniversary of their opposition rally to the famous 1963 March on Washington led by Dr, Martin Luther King, Jr. I photographed this march on a hot Summer day as a murderous mob flaunted their racist and seditious beliefs.

It turned out that another freelancer and I experienced first hand the wrath of this maniacal mob. The KKK assembled their march at the Capitol and got a permit to march down Pennsylvania Ave to the White House where they would hold a rally. Many people lined the route shouting epithets and throwing raw eggs. Police phalanxes walked along with them to hold back the crowd. We photographers would be walking backwards in front of the marchers all the way.

That year, they held their rally around the platform on Lafayette Square across the street from the White House. But, as a freelancer, I knew I had to find a unique slant to the photo story or else my images would never been looked at by magazine editors who always favored their own staff photographers' take. So, I wandered around the fringe and caught a whiff of tear gas from about a block away near Farragut Square. There, I hooked up with the other freelancer named Robert, and the two of us soon found ourselves in the middle of 17th St NW and a riotous side show of citizens fighting white supremacists in a face off inside a cloud of tear gas.

Of course...we ran to the middle of it because that's where the pictures were.

Standing in between the KKK and the counter demonstrators along K Street, we made some pretty good images of what it felt like in the fog of the anger, the gas in the air and lungs, and the bricks torn from the sidewalk flying through the air. All seemed pretty normal... for a few minutes.

And then, we saw it.

Along the fringe of the street some KKK rioters saw Robert and me making our pictures. And, more importantly, we both saw them... coming at us from about 50 feet away. They were screaming about , "The Media!" and "They've got pictures of us!" and "Let's get them bastards!" We looked quickly at one another and knew then we had to run like hell or else a dozen pipe-wielding fanatics would capture us and beat us. We did not stop running until we were about two blocks away where we ducked inside a building. We waited a while and there was no sign of them. Cautiously, we left our haven and walked a block or so west to avoid the core of the rioting.

About a block from Lafayette Square, we saw something we thought we would ever see in America. A UPI photographer we knew who had climbed on top of a USA Today news box for an overall shot of the mob, was grabbed by rioters and pulled to the ground. We him being kicked and we started to run toward him to help, but - just in time - a Metro Police car came up, grabbed him from the mob, and threw him into the back seat of the squad car.

Robert and I ran off and sought safety in the cordoned off press area to catch our breath.

That UPI photographer suffered a broken collar bone and index finger, a concussion, and the loss of his cameras. But, a least he was alive.

My brush with the danger of an enraged mob driven by hatred of others, disdain for the law and the sanctity of the First Amendment was small time compared to what John Minchillo and a dozen others have endured in the last year alone, as they covered many riots in this country. They lay themselves out there, infiltrate into what everyone in the country now sees as a dangerous mob of radical skinheads, neo-Nazi's, white supremacists, and flat out crazy bastards, to bring us the experience of the rage and frothing at the mouth of people who want to hurt others, and impose their brand of authoritarianism, and destroy our way of life.

Thank you, John...Stay well.

]]><![CDATA[Photography in the new year...]]>Sun, 03 Jan 2021 01:30:59 GMThttp://rogerpwatts.com/blog/photography-in-the-new-yearIn many respects, it is very hard to say where my photography will go this year. Truth be told, I am sick of just making the images for myself. I guess that says a lot about me as an artist (or wannabe) because I have always felt that real artists create work for themselves and don't wonder if anyone will ever see it or like it. vanGogh never sold one painting in his lifetime (his brother Theo bought them all for his gallery just to support him, but no one bought any of them). He didn't seem to care and pushed on creating an entirely new art form right up till the end.

But all my work, unless I give it away, is never seen by anyone. I know that few humans come to these pages, and even bots spend so little time here (ave 3 secs) because even they must be bored. There's no venue to park the work. There's no megaphone for my visual voice in order to be heard... as garbled, hoarse, and accented with loneliness and anger and fear that it is. The Covid quarantine makes it so much worse than the typical day it has been for me for years now.

And, then there is the work of so many others who I marvel at because it is either beautiful or powerful documents or the symbolic essence of life as it is lived today. What I wouldn't give to have been the photographer who made any of these.....

But, that's not how it has worked out for me. Instead, like Salieri lamented in the movie Amadeus when he compared himself to his rival Mozart - "Why have I been given such a great appreciation for genius without being one myself?" Sorry, but my failure to find a platform for my work has meant that few people see how I see the world.

It sometimes gets discouraging this way and that probably accounts for the fits-and-starts of this blog and the hit-or-miss entries into "thebestthingi'veseentoday" piece on this site's Home Page. I was just never able to get someone to pay the freight so I could be at the right place at the right time, then have someone who valued it enough to show people.

Also, it's quite possible that I have hung around too long in the way my mentor Homer Page discovered in his own life as a photojournalist... sometimes you have to walk away from making photographs because it's all been done before, and why try if you can't be at the frontier of the best way to tell a story in pictures.

I know I'll keep going. I just love the process of making photographs and of the quest to find in each I take the essence of whatever it is to be found in the person, place, thing, or situation I stumble upon. It's not much, but it's all I've got.

Happy New Year!

]]><![CDATA[June 07th, 2020]]>Sun, 07 Jun 2020 07:02:05 GMThttp://rogerpwatts.com/blog/june-07th-2020I am stunned by the public murder of George Floyd. Everyone of conscience is.

But, I am saddened by my response...or lack of it. For a lot of reasons related to my health, attending the riots on the day after his death or the peaceful protests throughout the past 12 days has meant that I have been sidelined for our collective mourning. I am not trying here to make this cataclysmic tragedy all about me. Yet, as a photographer who thinks of himself as someone eager to document the human condition, to have sat in my apartment throughout it all is agonizing.

There has been some remarkably stunning work done by dozens of photojournalists, and it hurts deeply that I could not be on the frontier smack dab right in the middle between the cops and the people of conscience. Their pictures are stunning. One photographer, John Marchillo, who I think works out for the NY Times, made the iconic image for this suffering we all share and it is mesmerizing - it's a Pulitzer magnet for sure.

It is unbelievably hard to make an image so perfect in a demonstration or riot. The chaos, the heat, the smoke, the screams, the police batons slamming their shields, the sirens, the flashing lights, the dazed terror in the eyes of demonstrators and cops alike... how is it possible that someone would be able to capture this human spirit in the midst of that?

My health held me back from this. Tear gas is too much for my weak and damaged lungs - I know because I have sucked in the razor blade gas that cuts the throat and blinds you more than once in demonstrations in DC. So, I know I could not go. And, at my age and with my basic attitude toward injustice when I see it, I too would've been pushed to the ground like that other 70+ old guy in Buffalo who "tripped" and cracked his scull. I must keep working or lose everything at my age and I couldn't even afford the time off in jail or even the bail money now.

So, I, like most people, live vicariously through the witness that photojournalists bear for us in times like these. They give us enduring memory...something video can't give us as it moves too quickly through an explosion like this when bodies and signs and gas and rubber bullets move in unbelievable slow motion. Only stills can etch not only the image itself but the power-packed emotion behind it into our media-saturated brains. Photographers have been doing this for more than 160 years as they brave the conditions most of us would wilt under to hang in there, keep the eye glued to the finder, let the lens be your eye, and patiently wait out the moment when it happens....

John Marchillo... I wish I could buy you a beer.

]]><![CDATA[What George Floyd's murder means...]]>Sun, 31 May 2020 14:04:21 GMThttp://rogerpwatts.com/blog/what-george-floyds-murder-means

What happens to a dream deferred?

     Does it dry up
     like a raisin in the sun?
     Or fester like a sore -
     And then run?
     Does it stink like rotten meat?
     Or crust and sugar over -
     like a syrupy sweet?

     Maybe it just sags
     like a heavy load.

     Or does it explode?
                                            --- Harlem, Langston Hughes

I am so very sick of the racism that lives under the syrupy sweet crust of MN Nice.

So is Trevor Noah who explains it all in a beautiful and powerfully personal way.

]]><![CDATA[Love's Labour's Lost...]]>Fri, 08 May 2020 16:32:34 GMThttp://rogerpwatts.com/blog/may-08th-2020My 95 year old Mom is dying.

Talk about feeling inadequate...even Shakespeare's comedy could not touch the irony of this. I'm 1200 miles away and can't do anything to help or comfort or reach out or soothe not only her but my soul over it. I called every day for 2 years, and now she can't talk. But, I am OK because I am processing this with friends.

But now, the virus lock down has stripped me of the only thing I could do about this.

To some who is not a photographer, there may be shock by what I am to say next. It is so terribly sad that at this moment in her life that I am unable to photograph my Mom. I cannot travel because of my own lung health condition, so I cannot be there to document these last days of her life. I have been photographing her since I first picked up a camera in 1967. That's when the bookstart photographs began, but to not have the bookend photographs means that the volumes of photographs are always wobbling and might one day fall out of the bookcase. There is no photo-closure.

This is made worse for me considering the vast array of photographs others have made of their dying relatives that go way beyond poignancy and penetrate drive right to your core.

Maggie Steber's documentary work of her Mom's last few months is the very best.

I don't pretend to be a Maggie Steber. This work she did expresses universal emotions about death and dying of loved ones...perhaps even our own. In her work I find a kind of peace, especially with a photograph like this one from behind because that could be my Mom in that chair. One of my self-criticisms is that my photographs don't offer this kind of universality. But, in this case, I would not be looking for that in photographs of mu Mom...they'd be for me.

I wish I could thank Maggie for this experience... never will. I am very far outside her loop. But, maybe I don't have to. I'll bet she knows the importance of this for everyone.

How can you not be grateful for the experience she gives us?

]]><![CDATA[Peter Turnley...]]>Tue, 05 May 2020 22:00:12 GMThttp://rogerpwatts.com/blog/peter-turnley

Peter Turnley has lived the life I might've but didn't have the guts to do it.

Peter is a renowned photographer who has been making documentary photographs around the world since the 1970s. He has a twin brother who has done the same, but it is Peter that the world turns to when looking for the poetry in photojournalism.

His work these days reflects a bold and new adventure he is living now in his apartment in New York City. He's trapped there, like all of us are trapped in our caves these days, and it is not his permanent home. He has lived in Paris for 45 years and keeps the NYC apartment like so many New Yorkers do...because he can.

He has, since March 20th, been documenting the life of people in NYC. He and hundreds of other photographers have, and there's no denying that the images most have produced since the virus lock down have been very powerful images. Yet, Peter's seem different.

They reflect is basic humanity, his passion for life, he enormous respect for everyday struggles, and - in this work today - his deep love and admiration for Corona heroes, first responders, medical staff, soup kitchen volunteers, bus drivers.

I wish I had the guts to do this kind of work. Yet, it is clear, that the only way you make photographs as powerful as his at the apex of the documentary art form is to have done them this way for decades. I haven't. It's hubris to think that I could or even should.

The important thing for anyone who has never had to document life to remember is how incredibly difficult it is to do. You have to overcome the technical limits of the photographic process; the storm troopers of law enforcement, security guards, bodyguards, lawyers and politicians whose job it is to protect whoever from you; the invisible barriers of fear, bias, and worry that exists between you and the person you want to photograph; the suspicion of "What are you going to do with them?" or "You gotta pay me for doing that." or "Get out of my face!" or "Are you working for the cops?" or anything else as we as people grow farther apart; the inner demon of insecurity, fear of failure, shyness, or any other internal filter you have that holds you back...any of these things separate the men from the boys in documentary photography today.

Peter penetrates that. He has exudes an inner warmth, a trust, a comparability. He disarms people with honesty, gentleness, authenticity, compassion, and genuine concern. He forms a relationship long before he presses the shutter.

This is such a valuable skill to have. It instill trust in the person that their soul will not be ripped out of their chest by the act of making a photograph.

This is so hard to do. But, Peter does it. And he does it well.

]]><![CDATA[Random thoughts...]]>Fri, 01 May 2020 16:43:24 GMThttp://rogerpwatts.com/blog/random-thoughtsIt's the end of the semester today and for the past several days I have been feeling it. I have 57 students in three classes this semester and each of them has a long term paper due today that is their Final Exam for the course. I ask them to do a psychological analysis of the feature film, Zootopia - one of the best movies every made and a film chock foul of animals (really people) with mental health, mental illness, personality disorders and behaviors.

I have been filling the spaces in between with watching video seminars put on by the Leica camera company. I use Leica cameras and have for years going back to the old journalism days. They are light, fast, have superb lenses, and are rugged. Their are literally the best 35mm camera systems in the world. And, of course, the most expensive. My M10 was purchased after I received a settlement for a botched business relationship. Money well spent.

The seminars are interesting, but they are also frustrating. Sometimes I wonder why I watch them. usually, they are photographers who have been well-known for years. They describe their lives as a photo-artist or photo-journalist through a review of their portfolios or current projects. And, they are all really good more or less even though some subject matter doesn't interest me much.

One thread runs through them all...at one point in their careers they got a big break. Some of these are packed with the chance for resentment - one guy "was discovered" by Herb Ritts - a major photographer of the rich and famous in Hollywood - and was spurred on by Ritts to do work that brought him the top of fashion and commercial photography. It proves again, not what you know but who you know. I can't shake that like gum on my shoe.

Other big brake came form hard work. Susan Meiselas if a giant in documentary work and got that way by superb photos and risk taking in Central America in the 1980s. Great stuff, proves her stamina and resilience and courage. I love her work. She did what I wanted to do but didn't: She photographed Nicaragua in civil war. I thought, since I wasn't a petite woman with an ease about me like Susan, that - since I also looked like a Sandinista rebel too - I probably would've been killed if I went there. I had a lot of trouble all my life not standing out in a crowd and it makes photographing in public hard in the USA... I can't imagine how strongly soldiers with an axe to grind against Americans might've reacted.That didn't affect other men who did and made their bones in the Central American wars. But, it did me, and I often wonder what it m might've been like to have more courage and skill. Susan jettisoned to the top of the field with her work there, got a chance to do brilliant work elsewhere, and had a great career.

Other videos are more technical and i watch them because I have this dream (illusion? or delusion?) that one day I will teach photography. Probably will never happen because I was rejected for a job at a local college once because I did not have an MFA - Master in Fine Arts. In other words, I wasn't anointed by the art community as a "real" photographer and should not teach others how to not be a real photographer.

But, I still muse on that every now and again.

i continue to post pictures of my sorties out into the Corona-infused environment around Minneapolis. Not brave o do so, but a chance to make my own photographs of the experience of isolation, change, and loneliness.
]]><![CDATA[Photographers who blow me away...]]>Mon, 27 Apr 2020 10:49:35 GMThttp://rogerpwatts.com/blog/photographers-who-blow-me-awayI have two friends, David Astin and John Dykstra who have mastered an art form that I have always struggled to photograph well.

David Astin's Owl John Dykstra's Duck

David Astin may be the most accomplished nature photographer you have never heard of.
His work is stunning. This photograph of an owl in flight will mow you down. It is not only perfectly exposed, with a remarkably sharp bird's eye coupled with just the right amount of out of focus, but it is dramatic because of the action. It's one thing to photograph an animal at rest...it's an entirely different matter capturing the image while they are engaged in their job - In this case, the owl's pursuit of a rodent across the field.

My phone camera copy here does not come close to honoring the photograph. But, it is the most remarkable photograph of a bird in flight I have ever seen. The original image is stunning. You can see more of his work at https://learningtoseenature.com.

John Dykstra is a less well=known photographer, yet his work is also extraordinary. I am not sure I have ever seem someone whose work is so precise as John's. He has made such extraordinary photographs of animals in the field that you would swear are made in a studio. His ability to control for lighting and composition is remarkable. You can see more of his remarkable collection of work on his Facebook page... https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=john%20dykstra%20photos&epa=SEARCH_BOX

What you see in this work is two photographers that have mastered an art. No, it's not necessarily the art of photography although it is very clear from what you see that they are Masters. The art I am talking about is patience... the art of waiting out the time it takes for life to unfold in your viewfinder. Patience is dependent, not on your timetable, but on nature's timetable. Both men will tell you that they have spent hundreds (thousands?) of hours waiting for an animals to do something worthy of a prize-winning photograph. In every one of the photographs I have seen from these men, that is the big takeaway... How did they manage to hang in there that long?

I believe most people would agree that the legendary work of Jim Brandenburg (who lives in Ely MN) is world-renowned for its excellence. I believe Jim might not even classify himself as a nature photographer even though that has been the genre he has concentrated for so long, first on his own, and then as a contract photographer for National Geographic. Jim photographs animals to show their life as a metaphor for the human condition. His photographs of wolves is more than just about the wolfs. They are about survival and stamina and perseverance against odds. His personal project that turned into a remarkable book, "Chasing the Light," is one of the most astounding feats of photography ever done. It is a 90-day journey through Jim;'s life as he restricted himself to making only one photograph a day for 90 days. You have to see it to believe it. Jim's work is a benchmark. And David and John know that. So, when they choose to make nature photography their niche, they know the mark to hit was sky high.

And, they hit is most of the time.

I am proud to know both David and John although I wish to knew them better. I put together a series of photographs tagging along with David one morning as we strod through a field in central Minnesota in search of birds to photograph. I'll be posting those to my site here tomorrow and link them here. And, I see John most often in connection with the Theatre in the Round where we both donate our work for actors and the theater...I with my photographs of plays and John with his expertise in lighting design (Pssst - he's great at that also).

Patience. It's something we all need. But, it is never more true than for a nature photographer who battles the elements and the behaviors of elusive animals. It is a lesson for any photographer who wants to make photographs other than just take them.

]]><![CDATA[Blown away by Maggie Steber...]]>Thu, 23 Apr 2020 17:07:48 GMThttp://rogerpwatts.com/blog/blown-away-by-maggie-steberMeditate on this image for a bit...

To many people, this is just the portrait of some people who appear to be a family. It is technically a beautiful photograph. It is one done in a manner that many photographers aspire to... the "Rembrandt lighting look." The light, although coming from a known direction, fills the most critical parts of the image...those that most emphasize the essential visual elements.

Yet, the lighting does so much, much more than that. It concentrates our vision towards the center of the frame. It drives us to the central point. Many people will assume this central point is the love that a mother and father have for their child. Yet, one can see this in the gazillions of photographs made every day of families. No... THIS one is special. It is so, even if you are not sure why.

One of the things that may make a person quizzical is the nature or gender of the child...not girl, but not quite boy either? Perhaps disfigured, or having facial features suggesting mental illness or biologically driven illnesses like fetal alcohol syndrome?

It is none of these things. This photograph, by America's premier documentary photographers Maggie Steber, was made on assignment for National Geographic. They assigned her to this story because of her ability to make close, personal, dynamic, deep, and meaningful relationships. And, this assignment required a photographer to be all those things on top of having the requisite technical skill to make "Nat Geo" photos.

Why so? Because the photographer who was to illustrate this story had to gain the near complete trust of the entire family to enter into a most private and glorious world.

The back story is about a young woman named Katie. She was stunningly beautiful and had so much in her young adulthood to live for. She was the bubbly pride of her family and electrifying in many ways. Then, as it happens, a boyfriend broke up with her. She despaired. We aren't privy to all that caused that, but we are privy to what Katie did about that.

She took her brothers rifle and tried to kill herself. Instead of that working, she ended up blowing off most of her face.

This was much, much more horrific for the family and for her than anything we can experience even now, when you might have just been given the punchline to this story... horrified and stunned.

But, the story does not end there. What Maggie Steber was assigned to do was illustrate the miraculous medical achievement of giving Katie a new face. For a long, long time, as Katie rehabilitated and learned how to live in the painful and difficult life left for herself, the medical teams treating her found that they could transplant a face onto Katie's and give her a new life.

Some may recoil at this dystopian notion of rebuilding humans in some horror movie way. But, this is not that story and so anyone can appreciate this story for what makes it so powerful.

Doctors found a young woman who had overdosed on drugs, and transplanted her face onto Katie's. The result is the face of a young woman who has unique characteristics for sure, but is something much deeper than the cosmetics of it. Here, Katie now has her life back as well as giving life again to that young woman who died so tragically. Obviously, something with much deeper personal and psychological ramifications than just your average survival story.

Maggie Steber was assigned to illustrate that. Can you imagine, in the most creative frontiers of you mind, any better photograph to give us the true story of Katie and her parents and the young woman whose life lives on as Katie? No.

Two things hit me when I saw this photograph. First, I remembered that in the early 1990s I met a Donnie who had, like Katie, attempted suicide by shot gun and, when he reached down his stretch for the trigger tilted it slightly from his mouth and the result was the same for him as Katie - he blew most of his face off. Second though, here he was in front of me, not with a new face from someone else, but his own that had been jigsawed back together by surgeons. He was living a life dedicated to others who considered suicide. I did not make the photographic portrait of him that stands close to what Maggie Steber did with Katie, and it showed me my limits as a photographer and artist. I think this moment, of not doing what Maggie was so able to do, showed the internal barriers I had then which prevented me from making photographs that were powerfully emotional and empathic.

Today, I see in the masterpiece that Maggie Steber has given us the power of the still image. No video can provide the power of this photograph for us to meditate upon. No video can give us the cataclysmic emotional movement that this till photograph conveys. And, no photograph can demonstrate to us the emotional courage it takes for a photographer to bond with his/her subjects and create a frontier-busting image that makes us feel so human.

I don't know Maggie Steber, but I am so very proud of her.

]]><![CDATA[A rant about visual truths...]]>Tue, 21 Apr 2020 05:33:11 GMThttp://rogerpwatts.com/blog/a-rant-about-visual-truths     I believe the bombardment of photographic images we have experienced in the early part of the 21st century has dulled our appreciation for the nuance of life. I also think we have become relatively poor critical thinkers about our personal, interpersonal, social, political and spiritual selves as experienced in the people, places, things, and situations we encounter every day. This has inured us to depravity, reprehensible behaviors, matters of life and death, etc. Witness our dulled reaction to Adams's AP photo of the assassination of a Vietcong guerrilla, our recoil-without-action to public beheadings by ISIS, images of starving children in Africa or Brooklyn, or any one of the millions of photographs taken of street people. We have become anesthetized to the pain of it all. We have, for at least the past 30 years, been saturated with the dual messages of poverty in our cities and prosperity in our suburbs. It may have all started when we found ourselves in the 1960s at the dinner table watching footage of the day's slaughter in Vietnam: You have a choice - eat dinner or be sick to your stomach...most people chose to eat.

     In almost every sense, except for a few, people have found it easy to regard the content of photographs with only personal meaning that sometimes denies either the event took place or that it is relevant to them. I sometimes wonder what happened to objective reality.

     In the era of fake news messages that have been pummeling the America public for the past four years, it is no longer possible to trust an image. First, one can never be sure if it was manipulated somehow in order to fulfill some polemic. Second, we can never be sure that the source of the image (photographer) does not have - in the normal process of selecting what is "important" to show in a frame - some bias, prejudice, or angle for discrimination in the works. Third, many of the images circulated toady - especially in social media - were not taken by the person using them and the original intent of the image is lost to the narrow self-interest of the re-tweeter.

     Doubt has now been engraved in the collective mind that anything recorded in any way is real even by the photographers themselves. A voice on a pornographic audio recording clearly pointing to a major political figure can, by his denial that the well-known voice belongs to him, instill confusion in people who are not critical thinkers. Demagogues love confusion. Many images - going back to the mid-nineteenth century Crimean War photos of cannonballs along a battlefield roadway (Fenton, "Valley of the Shadow of Death") - can no longer be relied upon to show the truth. It's as if the biased photographer is gas lighting everyone about what we see versus what they want us to see. So, it is wrong to think that Photoshop has somehow suddenly introduced to the world a way to manipulate what one sees in a photograph in order to fake us out. Visual lying has been with us a long time.

     The practical result is the wonder most of us in the photography field have as to how anyone can make money in the field these days. Certainly, the industrial, fashion, and even the technical/medical photographers have a future...and they will be paid in it. Yet, others, especially the photojournalists, need to indenture themselves to news organizations today in order to not only get paid but for their photographs to be seen by anyone other than their family. Furthermore, I was a photo editor for a national weekly magazine-like paper and I know how it is editors require only certain styles or content in assigned stories in order to fit layout or story slants. So, even editorial work can be hazardous to the "truth."

     Even wedding photographers, where I and many others cut their teeth in the field, is not longer the domain of the still photographer. Bride's mothers are paying tens of thousands for videos of weddings from which the videographer in a lab can lift any number of perfectly acceptable (to the bride's mother) memories of the big moment. Aside: I took a photograph of a wedding of a friend last year. The “bouquet throw" - an icon of the genre - is a big moment. I've photographed it a hundred times before so I knew where to stand and when to click the shutter. I noticed the videographer didn't. I got the bride overlooking her should after the toss with her face to the camera, the bouquet in the air, the outreached hand of the woman catching it, and the glee on everyone faces...all in one shot. The bride's mother said…”it’s OK, but the video one shows everyone being happy in the background and I like that. I don't need your picture." Welcome to the new world of wedding photography.

     It is a troubling time for photographers and communicators as we sit on the cusp of a new informational world order dictated by the subjective judgement of a view as to the authenticity of images. Tough times indeed.
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