LECTURA FOTO 8

“Photojournalism and the Tabloid Press” by Karin E. Becker
The following considers an essay entitled “Photojournalism and the Tabloid Press” by Karin E. Becker
The main contention of Beckers article is that while journalism is considered worthy of intellectual engagement, corresponding discussion of photography is excluded since the photograph is regarded as being concerned with the popular andtrivial even being “seen as a direct threat to reason.” Becker describes in her article the manner in which this has come about, resulting in a form of photography that is prevented from functioning as a “window on the world” since it is being used as both a means of constructing news and simultaneously deconstructing it.
At the beginning of her essay, Becker mentions the denegrated status ofphotography in the context of the tabloids. Following her arguement, she is in a position to be more exacting about the nature of photography in the tabloids which is characterised not by the unique qualities the photograph has to offer but by over-worked images, lay outs and text.
To argue her case, Becker starts by describing early forms of newspaper illustration where pictures in the press weredrawn by artists and in particular engraved upon wood, a much more reliable method that the hit and miss approach of photography; hence newspaper illustration developed within the confines of artistic disciplines until the half-tone process of printing made photography, with it’s own peculiarities, a viable means of representation. When photographic reproduction did became viable, non-photographicideas about illustration has taken root. Since the tabloids are concerned with the sensational, photography too was used to support this by such methods as photo-montages, and became associated with means that undermine the nature of ethical journalism in order to sell more newspapers. When photojournalism did take off in illustrated periodicals and was raised to that of popular art, it did not gettaken up by the tabloids that continued to adopt a more formal approach to the photograph with correspondingly predictable compositions. The front page of the tabloid typically uses the photograph as a poster with famous people being portrayed in a conventional manner. Photographs in the tabloid press are often very plain with their message being communicated through text rather than visually,their informal manner reminiscent of family photographs although they are far from familiar. This is certainly true of celebrities who are often pictured in their homes, an apparently privileged glimpse, yet also sometimes photographed in uncompromising positions where poor composition helps to give what Alan Sekula has called “the theory of the higher truth of the stolen image.” This kind of candidphotograph with it’s inevitable technical flaws as images are grabbed, further denigrates the classical style of images which require a more considered composition, correct exposure and less grain. Even when important people are photographed, their portraits are very conventional unlike those of ordinary people who are pictured more prominently. Photographs in the tabloid press acquire meaning bythe words that surround them which often tend to dominate the images with the use of large letters and dramatic headlines; the authority of the photograph is subservient to that of the text which informs us of what we are seeing. Candid images suggest unconstructed truth which the text asserts while the photographer takes on an almost heroic role yet often the photographer’s work is cropped andworked over in a way that is divorced from the original representation of fact.
Becker does cite the use of photographs in other media such as magazines and this helps strengthen her argument because it shows that photographs can be used effectively to communicate news in a complimentary way; hence this further highlights the degrading attitude of the tabloid press.
By giving an account of the way...