Conflicted, Washington National Cathedral, Washington, DC, 2006

Fine-art photography as photojournalism.
Jörg Colberg, Review: Sawdust Mountain by Eirik Johnson:

As I mentioned on this blog before, there is a little bit of soul searching going on in photojournalistic circles. What I find fascinating about the debates and commentaries I’ve seen is the implicit acknowledgment that fine-art photographers not only managed to expand the public’s idea of what photography can look like, but they can also produce work that challenges standard photojournalistic practice.

… Books like Sawdust Mountain are proof of how valuable fine-art photography really has become. … to an increasing extent, fine-art photography is now filling gaps in areas where previously a newspaper might have paid a reporting team to cover a topic in-depth.

I see this development as one of the reasons why books like Sawdust Mountain are so special. There is a lot of talk about “citizen journalism”. I don’t know what an equivalent term would be for books like Sawdust Mountain. But regardless of what it might be, with photographers like Eirik Johnson producing bodies of work that address vital issues in ways that are harder and harder to find elsewhere, it is time for us to give these photographers the credit they deserve.

A question of demand or supply?
Last year I wondered if photojournalism could adapt to the “low attention” economy:

In essence, traditional photojournalism is a form of communication that is ill-suited to short-attention media, short-attention forms of communication and a short-attention audience.

But perhaps I confused the medium with the form of communication; traditional photojournalism can still be effective in short- and long-form across a variety of mediums and a range of attention spans as long as the content fits the medium. Newspapers and magazines have decreased their support for photojournalism, but I would argue that’s a sign of an opportunity instead of a problem; people still want photography and photojournalism, we just don’t want it the way newspapers and magazines deliver it to us.

Print is different, not dead.
As the raison d’être for newspapers and mass magazines disappears, photojournalists (as a microcosm of journalists), need to explore different avenues for distributing their work. Online mediums such as blogs, flickr and social communities are the obvious alternatives, but physical printed mediums may still have a role; in-depth, high quality fine-art photography books such as Sawdust Mountain are expensive and create and distribute, but Blurb and MagCloud are easy-to-use, scalable, cost-efficient methods alternative for individuals and small organizations to use in a variety of creative ways.

Discard labels, embrace the mess, test the edges and start hacking.
Photography, both as art and a business, lies in an interesting world, shaped by it’s own unique cultural vestiges and influenced by many of the larger cultural and economic shifts reshaping the role of media, communication, markets and the power of humanity. The increasing democratization of photography has confused our definitions of professional and amateur and changed how we value photography, but that need not a recrimination of photography, photographers or photography lovers.

A wider range of people creating and consuming photography is an opportunity, not a problem. Ignore new opportunities at your peril.