Raise your hand if you remember Winston Churchill's funeral in January, 1965. It was a turning point in photojournalism.

There is currently a debate on the National Press Photographers Association web list about whether or not photojournalism is dead, and we've been asked to address that question.

Is photojournalism really dead? Hardly. Evolving? Of course, as well it should be. I shudder to think that we should all stand still forever. If photojournalism had stood still in the good old days, we would still be using large format cameras to shoot absurdly posed photos. Live TV would be the stuff for a Tom Swift novel, as would be the Internet.

Let's go back to Churchill's funeral for a moment, though, before we check in again with the Medical Examiner about the state of our profession.

Life magazine was...well, how do you explain it to someone who doesn't remember? The big glossy magazine with the imposing red logo brought the world to people's homes, like no other publication ever had. The magazine spared no expense to send photographers around the world. And then Winston Churchill died January 24, 1965.

Life chartered a Boeing 707 jet, ripped out the insides, and converted the plane into a traveling color darkroom and magazine editing suite. Life's typically spectacular coverage of the funeral was ready to rush to the Donnelly printing plant in Chicago by the time the jet finished its flight from London to New York. However, there was one possibly unforeseen problem: many people had already watched the funeral on television, and were less inclined to gobble up Life's next issue than they would have been, say, five years before. The weekly magazine folded in 1972.

Though I date the beginning of a major change in photojournalism to Churchill's funeral, Dirck Halstead asserts that the turning point for our profession was 25 years later, in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall. There is no doubt that Halstead's kind of photojournalism - he is a photographer for Time, the same company that published Life - has changed irrevocably. The date that "the music died," as Tom Burton phrases it, is less important than determing whether or not it is in fact dead.

I won't argue with Halstead when he laments the reluctance of the Big Publishers and the Major Networks to commit the resources to cover global events as they once did. I won't argue, either, with his assertions that war photographers don't have the access they once had; that photographers are being victimized by unscrupulous business practices imposed by wire services and major publishing corporations; or that a host of other things have changed forever in our profession.

Nor will I argue with Dick Kraus' assertions that we have been hurt by downsizing and the related pains that many industries have suffered as more of an emphasis is placed on shareholders' profits than on the product (and it's telling that newspapers are referred to by their out-of-town corporate chain owners as "product," as if they were a pair of shoes or a refrigerator).

In fact, there were five people in my newspaper's photo department when I was hired in 1978, and a part-timer was added a year later. I'm now the Director of Photography of a three-person department. Across the state, the LaCrosse Tribune, which is part of the chain that owns our paper, was even told to axe a photo position when digital cameras were introduced to the staff six months ago.

We could argue that these all points to the death of photojournalism...but I won't, because I don't believe it's true. Photojournalism as we once knew it may be dead in many respects, but that doesn't mean we should all line up to jump off the nearest cliff.

Let me digress for a moment, and tell you about a letter I wrote Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene a few years ago because I think it is a good analogy to the present discussion. I used to enjoy Greene's writing, but I wrote him that I was tired of his endless columns about how society seems to be going to hell in a hand basket, and, inferring that, gee, wouldn't it be great if we were back in the hunky-dory 1950s.

I wrote him that back in those golden years when every man wore a tie, every woman wore a dress, and kids were unfailingly polite, that blacks couldn't sit in the front of a bus in the south; little girls couldn't aspire to be anything by mommies, nurses, librarians, or teachers; that cancer patients had much less hope of surviving than they have today; and so on. Yup, some things were much better back then, but that doesn't mean we haven't made progress in other areas.

As we read Dick Kraus' pained rememberance of the great leadership of Harvey Weber at Newsday, there is no doubt that his newspaper has gone downhill. I'm sure there are many other papers whose photographers would relate similar stories.

On the flip side, though, many newspapers that have made a 180-degree change have changed for the better rather than for the worse. Budgets and picture display may have shrunk since the 1950s at some publications, but the vapid society page photos and corny posed photos that filled their pages have disappeared, as well.

The Chicago Tribune no longer has a daily picture page, but its picture editors today would not think of running one-columns photos of the block-long Conrad Hilton Hotel or of the battleship Missouri as their predecessors once did. The Tribune may not send photographers around the world as frequently as it once did, but it offers far more serious and credible journalism than it did in the good old days.

And what of the lesser-known papers, the ones that practice so-called community journalism? Just last week the Fresno, California, Bee, had a front-row seat on the storming of the Armenian parliament and the assassination of the prime minister because it had sent a reporter and photographer to cover a story of interest of its many Armenian readers.

The evolution of our profession means that thanks to the Internet, the Bee's readers in Fresno can still read the stories about Armenia if they missed an issue of the paper, just as I can from 2000 miles away .

Dick Kraus has covered President Kennedy's funeral, the 50th anniversary of D-Day from Normandy, and the crash of TWA Flight 800, among countless other stories. My newspaper's circulation is a fraction of Newsday's. We don't cover the big stories that Newsday covers.

Unlike Newsday, however, our newspaper runs almost every assignment a photographer shoots. Unlike Newsday, our newspaper has a photographer in charge of quality control for the entire newspaper's photo reproduction process, from newsroom through to the pressroom. Unlike many newspapers, our newspaper generally runs photos cropped the way they are scanned in by the photographers. Unlike many newspapers, our photo editor has a strong voice in news meetings, and has a pretty good say in which assignments are shot and how.

We are far from being the best photo paper in the country. I'd love to have more staff, time, and space with which to work, but if so many things are supposedly done better at our paper than at Newsday, and we aren't the best, well, then I have to think there are good things going on at other papers, too.

Radio news? People said it would kill newspapers.

Television? People said it would also spell the end of newspapers. Though we have lost many newspapers in the last two decades, there are still millions of people who wait for the thud of a rolled-up paper to hit the door every morning.

The Internet? People say it will spell the end of newspapers and of television as we know them. Radio and TV didn't kill us, and I don't think the web will either. Rather, it will give us a chance to evolve, perhaps into something we don't quite understand yet. In fact, Halstead, himself, is the leading proponent of The Platypus evolution of photojournalism, in which still photographers are honing their video skills and working in both mediums.

Our youngest son plays high school soccer. I was photographing one of his games a month ago when I saw a couple we hadn't seen in years. They told me their daughter was playing with her brother on the small private school boys' varsity team that Aaron was playing against. I made sure to shoot pictures of Anna and Joel Jacob, as well as of Aaron and his team.

That evening I called our high school sports columnist and suggested a story about this unusual brother/sister combination. We ran the story and two photos, and then sent them to the Associated Press which ran them as their statewide weekend feature package. I got a card from Connie Jacob a week later. Let me quote from it:

"Thanks so much for suggesting the article on Anna and Joel. It was very nicely done and was really great for Anna's self-esteem. We heard so many nice compliments. "God bless and keep up the beautiful shooting!!"

This little story about a brother and sister who play soccer together or countless other stories being shot every day in every corner of the world may not hold a candle to some of the stories Halstead and others have in mind when the pundits argue whether or not photojournalism is dead, but it is no less important.

I may not like every change we've seen in the 35 years since Churchill's funeral, but I'm not ready to jump off the cliff.

Behind the Viewfinder - A Year in the Life of Photojournalism
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