I am currently working on a project with the title, "Is Photo-journalism an invasion of privacy" I was wondering whether anyone had any useful sources (books, journals, sites etc) which offer objective arguements and represent both sides of the arguement.

Thank you for your time.

-- Rajesh Patel (Rajesh.R.Patel@student.shu.ac.uk), October 27, 1999

Answers

This may be too late to matter but if you contact The Assoc. of Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.. (AEJMC) at....

AEJMC Central Office 234 Outlet Pointe Blvd. Suite A Columbia SC 29210

You can pruchase a paper entitled -

Listening to the subjects of routine news photographs - A grounded moral inquiry

By Cindy Brown - Southern Mississippi

It will cost you $3.00 and it is a great paper.

On a very quick, personal note.......

None of us are getting rich out here. We just want to tell stories. Now for the celebrity shooters.... the paparazzi ..... that is not photojournalism.

-- Zack Arias (zack@usedfilm.com), December 07, 1999.

I retired from UPI after 44 years as a photo editor. I also taught photojournalism at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. On the subject of photojournalistic ethics I can't quote from books but I can speak from my own extensive experience. When I first started at UPI one of mentors was Don Hewitt, now Executive Producer of "60 Minutes" for CBS. He defined a photojouranlist as a journalist who uses a camera as a reporting tool. Recently he told a group of graduating journalists that they would be hired, not ordained, by an employer.

More than a hundred years ago a little girl asked her father if there really was a Santa Claus. He told her to write to the New York Daily Sun and if that paper said Santa was real she could believe it. The result of course was the most famnous editorial ever written. If somebody today suggested the same thing they would be carted off to a rubber room for an extended stay. More and more readers don't truyst us. Newspaper readership is falling. In the past ten years 100 daily papers have folded. I claim photojournalists must share the responsibility for our credibility crisis. Why? Take a look at the use of photos out of context, captions that insult the intelligence of readers or are outright lies, the unfounded interpretation of facial expressions, unbridled ditital manipulation are all contributing factors. If "it works" it gets used and never mind honesty or integrity. Some picture editors actually think a caption is a pimple on the ass of journalism. One of my former students was told, "Captions detract from photos". The statement was made by a photo editor at the sixth largest paper in the United States. One picture editor at a large paper in the South is more interested in an applicant's "vision" than in the individual's ability to connect photography with journalism. So what if the applicant doesn't understand the definition of "attribution". Understanding what quotation marks are for and how to use them is not important. Nonsense mission statements that include phrases such as "To follow my heart" are more impressive than a belief that photojournalism is a light, not a sword and that our responsibility is to convey fact, not fancy. Ed Hart

-- Ed Hart (ehnxp@aol.com), April 24, 2000.

I have been asked by Garth J. Levandoski of Northern Arizona University whether I have anything to ad to the comments I made four years ago regarding PJ ethics. Yes, I do and I'm sure my views are going to disturb the sensibilities of a few people.

First, mainstream PJ (newspapers, news magazines and wire services) has nothing to do with art. Art and photojournalism cannot exist in the same place at the same time. Art is interpretive, photojournalism is not.

For those who want to interpret images I suggest they get themselves a set of Rohrshach tests, a couch and a shingle and get out of journalism! I caqn go on but I'm out of room.===Ed Hart

-- Ed Hart (ehnxp@aol.com), April 19, 2004.