After hearing the report over his police radio, Weegee would
race to the scene of the crime and get to work. But his work
didn’t involve arresting suspects or holding gangsters at
gunpoint. He would go solely to capture the image on film, to be
put in print for the next day’s newspapers.
“The images attest to the drive and obsession of this one
person. Weegee was almost like a hunter in a way,” said UCLA
art Professor Arthur Ou, who teaches beginning photography.
“There was something more than giving these pictures to
newspapers, than just the journalistic sense of making images.
There was some artistic intent.”
The Getty Museum has put together a collection of over 60 of the
iconic images from ’30s and ’40s newspapers taken by
Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, and is pairing this exhibit
with another group of photos called “Pictures for the
Press,” which features some of the biggest news-making events
of the 20th century, like the atomic bomb dropped over Nagasaki or
the D-Day invasion of Omaha Beach, as documented by
photojournalists in newspapers or magazines of the day.
The exhibition of these collections inevitably provokes the
question of whether photojournalism constitutes art. These images
were taken for profit, in documentation of a specific event.
Yet the Getty Museum, known primarily for its collection of
classical art, has chosen to display them. (The exhibition’s
curator, Judith Keller, was out of town for personal reasons and
unavailable for additional comment).
How do you draw the line between where art ends and business
begins? It isn’t difficult to recognize that the celebrity
photos gracing the pages of Us Weekly will likely never resurface
as an artistic manifesto. However, in the case of Weegee and
others, the process of classifying images becomes far more
complicated.
“There is a fine line,” said Alex Klein, an graduate
student studying photography. “Weegee is a good example of
that because I really don’t think of him as just a
photojournalist. Sometimes the way a photographer gets close to his
subjects is through photojournalism because he couldn’t have
gotten as close as he did to things he wanted to photograph if he
hadn’t been hired by newspapers to do it.”
The issue becomes more complex in comparing photojournalism to
its artistic counterpart, documentary photography.
“Photojournalism comes from the day ““
“˜jour.’ Its root word means “˜of the
day,'” said art Professor James Welling at a recent
Hammer Museum panel discussing the evolution of photography as a
fine art form. “Art photographers may have a longer day, or
scope of vision, than a photojournalist’s day.”
Photographers publishing for a newspaper or magazine often try
to boil down an entire story to a single framed image. The image
itself becomes distorted and manipulated when viewed alongside its
text or explained by a written caption.
“A lot of times with photographic images, what is outside
of the picture is equally as important as what’s
inside,” Ou said. “In that sense, photojournalistic
images, taken out of the context of newspapers or magazines, could
have their meaning changed very easily.”
The French photographer Henri Cartier Bresson has often been
recognized as the father of the documentary mode of photography.
Bresson first addressed the idea of “finding the decisive
moment” in a day and capturing it in a photograph, which has
since been a concept embraced by photojournalists.
Documentary photography and photojournalism share many
similarities. Their distinctions come down to differences in intent
and time.
“I think for me the line is more when you’re
covering an event specifically for publication and not looking to
leave your artistic stamp on the image, versus exploring it and
documenting something,” Klein said. “It’s like
making a picture versus making a story.”
“Photojournalistic images are dependent on time, much more
so than documentary images,” Ou said. “They’re
reports or events of that particular day.”
Just as the meaning of a photo often depends on the context in
which it is being viewed, the development or classification of
photojournalism must also be taken in context. Photography has
really only been considered by the collectors market as another
expression of fine art in the last couple of decades.
Before that, renowned photographers such as Walker Evans and
Dorothea Lange were merely hired by the government’s Work
Projects Administration during the Depression of the 1930s to
document the plight of dying and starving people in the heartland
of America. Since then, their images have become iconic.
“In the early days of photography, there was no fine art
photography, so they shot photographs that we might consider to be
very artistic, but there was no concept of it as artistic
photography,” Klein said.
Because photography was not always valued as highly as drawing
or painting, photographers often had to take on projects for profit
so that they could continue on with their livelihood. For example,
Diane Arbus, a documentary photographer of the 1960s, was
specifically hired by publications to leave her unique artistic
stamp on the image needed for publication.
Similarly, photographers may pursue documentary projects that
are then partially reproduced as photo essays in a journalistic
publication. Although the presentation has changed, the intent has
not. Thus photojournalism at times can come down to a matter of
perception.
“The passage of time and reproduction in art publications
has sort of changed the meaning of these images,” Ou
said.
Perhaps photography’s most unique quality as an art medium
lies in its dependence on technology. As technology evolves,
photography does also.
What could be seen as photojournalism today could maintain a
lasting impact in the future, as Weegee’s arresting images
have done.
“I’m not so sure I could draw a line between
what’s art and what isn’t,” said professional
photographer Stephen Shore. “If you feel it’s iconic,
then it’s probably art.”