The Power of Words. Reporters and photographers on working together

11.25.98
Part 1: Reporters and photographers on working together

Related: Part 2: Reporters and photographers working together: What bugs us

        Business writer Lynn Arditi said that when she was getting to know Tim Barmann she learned a couple of things. Tim is a photographer turned business writer, who is now married to Lynn. First, she said, she learned that photographers have messy cars. Second, she found out that photographers hated reporters to use the phrase "my photographer." It denotes a time, now long gone, when photographers did play a secondardy role in journalism.
        Lynn's comments came during a discussion about how reporters and photographer work together — and how sometimes they don't work together. This is the first of two parts we will devote to this issue. Next week we will list the pet gripes of both groups, as well as the solutions to working together.
        Liz Rau, a reporter, said that when a reporter is interviewing someone, and the photographer starts talking and takes over the interview, that's really frustrating.
        "I'm talking about taking over the interview," said Liz. "There is a certain rhythm, photographers have certain ways of doing things and so do we, and then out of the blue here comes questions that throws off the whole rhythm of the interview. It can be frustrating.
        "I agree the photographer does not always have to be there exactly at that time," she said. "Maybe we should talk in advance. It might be that the reporter is not looking for a scene right away, but wants to talk to the person for an hour. That's not a picture for you guys."
        John Freidah, a photographer, said that some of these complaints stem from a story he worked on with Liz. It was a feature about a man who flew kites in Newport and John said the first problem was that he had to spend a long time waiting for Liz to finish her interview.
        "And now I'm inquisitive, and I like to talk. And sure enough, I'm sure I broke her train of thought a few times. I'm sitting there — what am I supposed to do? So I'm probably hurting Liz's interview.
        "Second, I'm wasting time. I'm sitting there an hour and a half; that's a poor waste of resources.
        "And thirdly, this was an accidental situation, and it raises another issue with ethics. I asked the gentleman: So I hear you come down here every day to fly kites. And he said: No, I'm here to fly kites for you guys today."
        "I'm not trying to lay blame anywhere. What I'm saying is that situation is absolutely, positively unacceptable. To have someone do something, whether they do it normally, they cannot do it for our benefit."
        "What John is saying," added Lynn, "is his pictures have to be real."
        "Exactly," said John.
        Lynn: "You can't go out to a situation because the Journal arranges an inteview and tell the guy to fly a kite and have a caption that says 'Joe Foe flies a kite every week' and have it real. For Liz's purposes, it does not matter."
        A reporter suggested that John should go back on a Saturday when the man was flying his kite.
        "Which is what I did," said John. "It was perfect. All it takes is a little communication."
        Wayne Miller, a reporter, asked if there is a policy that we do not ever pose pictures.
        Thea Breite, the AME/Visuals editor, said that it is a departmental policy. It is not written down anywhere. It is pretty standard at the higher echelons of photojournalism across the world. The problem is there are some gray areas: "What John thinks may be acceptable, I may not think is acceptable. And what I think is unacceptable, Joel [Rawson, the executive editor] may think is acceptable. The Visuals Department feels very strongly that you do not set anything up. Once you are doing that, you have a bad situation."
        But Wayne said we did that with all the pictures we ran of political candidates who were clearly posing.
        "That was clearly a portrait and the reader understands it is a portrait," said Thea.
        But Felice Freyer, the medical writer, said she was confused. She recalled a picture John had taken of a surgeon. First, John took a picture of the man in his scrubs.
        "But that was not enough," she added. "He took him down to the operating room, had him put a mask on, and took a picture as if John was being operated on, looking down, with the light behind around his head. This is an example of a photo that is a work of art and not an illustration of a story. And I wanted an illustration. So we have the nice circle of the light and the doctor, looking as if the reader was on the operating table. It was a total setup, and it was a portrait, but it was not a portrait because you could not tell what the guy looked like."
        "It's a portrait in that it is completely staged," replied John. "He is looking directly at me, but I created the environment that I wanted. As if I had the kite pull next to him. It's not like, I've been in situations where TV says: Can you make believe you are examining this woman's mouth? And they imitate an activity. Here, I had him standing there, I have the light a particular way, I have him wearing his hat, but it is clearly a portrait, that's what I wanted to do."
        The discussion moved on to the issue of taking pictures of a grieving family. A reporter raised this issue: if you are photographing the grieving family while the reporter asks questions, it's a totally manufactured situation."
        A photographer pointed out that that could be explained in the photo caption, which would say that the subjects in the story were responding to a reporters' questions.
        "I think the fundamental problem here is that the reporters and photographers are here for different reasons," said Tim Barmann, the photographer turned writer. "The reporter wants the subject to open up; the photographer wants them to forget that they are there."
        Travel Editor Alan Kerr said it appears there is a policy issue that needs to be resolved involing reconstructed events. "Writers have no objection, and subscribe to, reconstructing," he said. "But a photographer does not want to."
        Thea: "More than 'not want,' they should not."

Previous editions | About The Providence Journal's Writing Program | E-mail us | Order How I Wrote the Story | Writing-related Web links
Back to main