Dead or alive? That's been the gist of the conversation about documentary photography over the last few years. I think the nay-sayers are wrong (as do the participants in this recent panel discussion sponsored by Photoshelter). It's definitely true, however, that the emergence of online publications and the decline of print have created problems -- most importantly raising the question of how documentary photographers are to earn a living. But with the problems have come new possibilities.
Let's focus on the new possibilities and, especially, the way that they were exploited this weekend by the New York Time's Sunday Magazine. Online, it combined inside-the-beltway reporting with photography and streaming audio clips of interviews with jobless citizens in a struggling city to create a truly multidimensional view of the current economic crisis. In print, beautifully reproduced full- and quarter-page photos and snippets of the interviews added depth and complexity to the policy-wonk oriented reporting. In either form, the result was terrific.
New York Times Sunday Magazine, 23 January 2010.
All things being equal, I preferred the print version of Peter Baker's article, "The White House Looks for Work." Print is light and portable in a way that computers and iPads are not. I suppose that I could have read the story on my iPhone, but reading long stretches of prose on a tiny screen is no fun at all.
Alec Soth's "Portraits from a Job-Starved City," Rockford, Illinois, also looked better in print than on a computer screen. The the sheer humanity and presence of the people in the photos, which were printed large and scattered throughout the article, offered a not-so-subtle commentary the White House discussions that Baker describes. They were both passionate and urgent, and yet disconnected from the lives of ordinary people.
On the other hand, the online version contains many more of Soth's luminous portraits. More importantly, we can hear the audio that Michael Catano captured -- voices of his subjects speaking sometimes emotionally, sometimes dispassionately about the damage that the recession has done to their city and its people.
One of the nice things about the present moment is that we don't have to choose between online and print. We can have both.
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