Concluding Chapter

When writing my introduction to photojournalism on my blog, I mention that my own understanding of photojournalism is “capturing important moments or issues through pictures in order to deliver news or a story”. While this is true, my understanding of photojournalism has become more detailed and in-depth, and has allowed me to see that a majority of photojournalist’s cover stories to show people the real truth about a situation.

Learning about the history of photojournalism has definitely opened my eyes and taught me the positives and negatives about being a photojournalism in today’s age, or 100 years ago. Technology makes it a lot easier for photojournalists today and I bet most would find it impossible to continue their job with technology from a century ago.

My big “Ah-Ha” moment was when we learnt about the technology advancements of photography over the years. I did not know a lot about the history of camera’s and this really taught me that we take what we have today for granted.

When speaking about whether Photographs can change the world, I believe that my views are very similar to when we started this course. I believe that one picture can change the way that people think and act, and maybe lead to change.
An example of this would be the photograph below of African-American Olympic medalists Tommie Smith, and John Carlos raising their fists, to show what was known as the black power salute.

Photo by - Unknown

                 Image Source - http://all-that-is-interesting.com/influential-photographs/4

For my Creative Experimental Exercise, I decided to try and capture a local event with a photojournalism style. I attended the 4^th annual run for education on May 3^rd 2015 at 9am to try and cover the event and the winners.
My aim while shooting this event was to try to capture images that would be capable of being used in a newspaper article or an online news site.
Once I got back to upload the photographs I had taken, I uploaded some to a few news websites such as 22 News, Western Mass News, and MassLive, hoping that one of my photographs would maybe be used in one of their articles. I have yet to see one of the websites cover the story, but I will be checking daily. My photographs taken for this exercise are below -

 

Photo by -James Worrall

Photo by - James Worrall

Photo by - James Worrall

Some things that I learned from my classmate’s photojournalism profiles include – 

Photojournalist Ron Haviv was mentored by James Nachtwey (Yezenia Rodriguez’s Blog)

Ron Haviv - by Unknown
Image Source - http://www.starvedforattention.org/_img/press/photographers/Ron-Haviv.jpg

Kevin Carter’s suicide was caused by the nature of his own photographs (Brian Kennedy’s Blog) 

 

Photo by - Kevin Carter
Image Source  - https://iconicphotos.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/kevin-carter-vulture.jpg

 

 

 

 In Robert Capa’s photograph “Falling Soldier”, Capa actually asked the subject to do a “duck and roll” for a photograph, but was then shot and killed (Steven Cheung’s Blog).

Photo by - Robert Capa
Image source - https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGp-brmhfGrUSELocE0cBzHSUNFpc8NauLqILzPvXo8WNcqExLYWp_vpSopzZe5C5V1URQ6E1Y5HUURMUGXYWckbpMedEtUuSkdGoV338A1XyyeFgzk5T69JpLQFIy2yEDWA3-b7m1eXU/s1600/capa_essay_01.jpg