IT IS ONLY partly true, the cliché that today’s newspaper is tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapper. This is not just because fish and chips long ago ceased to be wrapped in newsprint. Nor is it because newspapers are perhaps in terminal decline and there may soon be no such thing as tomorrow’s newspaper. It is true that most of the words in newspapers vanish, almost without trace, not long after publication. I, for instance, have probably written many millions of words for newspapers and magazines, most of which, within hours, have been forgotten, even by me. Even outstanding pieces of newspaper journalism—their form, the quality of the writing—rather quickly lose their memorability, their vitality.
But photographs, great photographs, transcend time. They lodge in the memory whole, a moment frozen in time and therefore timeless. A great newspaper photograph, in the words of Stephen Dupont, who is quoted in this book, ‘has the greatest power to instil memory into people’.
Over more than four decades, I worked with some of the best photographers in Australia, first as a reporter and later as an editor. In many ways, the photographers I worked with taught me how to be a good reporter. They taught me how to see what I was witnessing, how to approach people, sometimes people who were in the midst of profound grief. They taught me, as much as any reporter, how to be still sometimes, let people speak, let them alone, be patient and alive to what was around me. That is how some of the best photographers do their work.
The relationship between reporters and photographers is a complex one. In my experience, in the newsroom, reporters and photographers did not share a common space. Perhaps that has changed recently but I doubt it. Changes in culture are not something newspapers do all that well. I never questioned why we reporters were separated in this way from photographers. It meant that, in the main, reporters and photographers did not form close friendships with each other, across the geographic divide so to speak. It meant that we often did not understand each other, the pressures we were under, our sense of what made a story, the things we each brought to the work, the challenges of getting it right, the picture and the words together, enhancing each other.
I worked with many of the photographers who tell their stories in this book and who reflect on their work, what has influenced them, and their relationships with editors and reporters. This book is rich with the voices of photographers, old and young, male and female.
I always knew how important photographs were to newspapers—well to some newspapers anyway. My years at the Sun News-Pictorial during the 1970s—the newspaper was aptly named—taught me to love photography, value it, and understand that many times, a photograph tells a story that words cannot tell. At the Sun, we all thought that the broadsheets used photographs badly—too small, often badly cropped, static, the photographs overwhelmed by too many words.
This of course changed dramatically in the 1990s. I think that Australian broadsheets were among the first to use photographs as if they were as important and informative as other forms of reporting, able to enhance the writing and even tell a story that words could not manage. Some of the great photographers I worked with were at the Age, and they helped change the paper. They certainly had a profound influence on me as editor.
But I did not know them the way I knew the reporters, some of whom were longstanding friends. The great photographers have not, in the main, written their personal stories. They have not been the subjects of biographies, like some well-known journalists. They have mostly spoken to us only through their work, and while their work lives on, their personal stories, their views about newspapers and about the role of photography in newspapers, have hardly ever been told.
Perhaps this is because the language of photographers is not words. Indeed, the industrial agreements for photographers and reporters were designed to ensure that each did not encroach on the other’s territory. Photographers were forbidden from using words, and reporters were not allowed to take photographs. (I wonder how many of the great photographers could write well and would have made terrific reporters given half a chance.) This is a great pity because I think it has meant that so few photographers have written—or even talked about—their often remarkable personal histories in newspapers.
One of the strengths of this book is that it tells some of these histories. But it also examines the many ways photography has told Australian stories in newspapers, and how photographs have profoundly influenced the way we have witnessed and regarded important, and not so important, events. It examines how technological change—the use of colour, the coming of the digital camera and the rise of digital media—has changed news photography and the work of professional photographers.
It looks at Australian history and Australian society by examining photographs that have captured and, in some cases, influenced historic changes in Australia’s social and political life. It is a fascinating story told with vigour and drama—Australian history seen through the lens of the newspaper photographer, who in many ways, even more than reporters, has recorded the first rough draft of our history.
And in that telling of Australian history, the authors have given us the life stories of some of Australia’s best known and best loved photographers. They have deepened our appreciation of the photographs that remain lodged in our collective and individual memories.
Some of the photographers in this book are among the bravest people I have known. Some of them have witnessed awful tragedies. I think it is wonderful that they can, in this book and in the longer interviews that will be housed in the National Library, talk, often for the first time, about what they experienced and how it affected them. In a sense what struck me most, even though I knew it of course, was that unlike reporters, photographers had to be there, in a bushfire or a flood, in a riot or a war zone; be there in the thick of chaos and danger and human misery to get the photograph that would tell the story that even the best reporter could not tell.
Reading this book, I remembered how on some assignments, the photographer I was with urged me on when I wanted to turn back because I thought it too dangerous to go on and I knew that I could write a story without risking injury or worse. When we were covering the 1983 bushfires, for instance. Or in Liverpool during the race riots in 1981, when the photographer shamed me into going into the heart of the rioting mob to describe what was happening rather than go back to the hotel and report it from the television coverage. Some of the photographers in this book made me a better reporter and a better editor.
This is not a book of photography, though there are some wonderful photographs in the book. In many ways, it’s an old-fashioned narrative history, the story zipping along, engaging the reader, the way all good narrative history manages to do. It is lively in tone, and it is written with skill and clarity and excitement. It does not avoid difficult issues, the ethical issues for instance, that are raised by news photography.
Photographs, like reporting, do not convey some objective truth. Like reporting, photographs can be unfair. Photographs can be cropped to change their meaning. Photographs can be digitally altered, in subtle ways sometimes, but sometimes so drastically that they tell a lie. The photographers talk about these issues with sensitivity and understanding but never dogmatically. There are no easy answers to some of the issues they raise, though now, more than ever, we need a set of agreed ethical rules for journalism in general and for photography in particular. I say this because most people are sceptical about the objectivity or fairness of much reporting, but they are not nearly as sceptical about the ‘truth’ of photographs. Some of the best-remembered and most significant photographs—the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima during the Pacific War, for instance—were staged. Does that change their ‘truth’? Not necessarily. But the fact that some of these photographs were staged and this was not revealed at the time of publication is a huge ethical problem.
This is a book for people who have a relationship with newspapers or who now have a relationship with the digital platforms of newspapers—which is most of us. Technology is changing everything in journalism, but some things remain unchanged in the new-media world—a world that in some ways is still in its infancy. The force of great photographs cannot be replaced by dazzling graphics and instant video presentations, which, like words, slip away and are quickly forgotten. Great photographs tell stories, capturing moments that, in a sense, are forever remembered, and experienced, outside the tyranny of time. This book honours those people who gave us the world in unforgettable images.
Michael Gawenda
August 2016