"I am not a photojournalist"

I've just finished my first 6 weeks of a 3 ½ month assignment at the United Nations. I was hired as a full time, although temporary, staff photographer until the end of the year, to cover the 54^th Session of the General Assembly when it convened in September. The assignment was too good to pass up, though I was concerned about leaving the newspapers, even for a short hiatus.

This is the first time I have had steady and predictable work since I started taking pictures about 11 years ago. It is the first time I have not had to worry about whether an editor call me, or whether taking a few days off would mean not getting work for awhile. It is the first time I have had a "respectable" job since I started taking pictures. It is the first time I have been treated like a professional photographer. It is the first time I have had a regular paycheck. When I checked the balance of my checking account after my first month, I told my husband that we'd better quick pay off VISA and Master Card or I was going on a buying spree at B&H Photo.

Although the hours are not completely unpredictable, they are often long, and during the first three weeks of the General Assembly, they were fairly arduous. The other two photographers and I trade off on night and weekend duty. There have been a few choice assignments but no one has gotten preferential treatment. When the Secretary General threw out the first pitch of game 3 of the World Series at Yankee Stadium, we all threw our names into a hat. Although I did not get that assignment, I was treated as a bona fide staffer, not simply as a stringer. And that has been true of every assignment I've done since day one at the UN.

I actually go into work dressed up. I've hung up my jeans and blazer, at least for the time being, for business suits. Although there were a couple of times where a skirt was a liability, such as when I nearly tripped when I got up on a chair to take a picture recently, I find that being dressed like the people I photograph tends to make people take you a little more seriously. I do realize that I'm not out traipsing around in the woods going after wolves or coyotes, as I've done in past newspaper assignments. There are people at the UN who believe in what they are doing. Cynicism seems to be in shorter supply than where I've been lately. However, that being said, how I've been treated and what I do as a photographer at the UN are two very different things.

On assignment: Susan Markisz waits in S-226 for the next press conference at the United Nations. October 1999 UN/DPI Photo by Sophie Paris

When I was asked to join the UN staff, I knew I would be covering a lot of grip and grins. I confess I've been awed by the access that I have had. I will admit to silently saying "cool" when I've photographed Prime Ministers and Presidents of nations that I read about in the international pages of the NYTimes & when I've been in the same room as Queen Noor of Jordan, or when I was asked personally by the Secretary General if I wouldn't mind doing a portrait of him and Mrs. Annan at their residence & or the day I photographed the President of the United States with the Secretary General and the President of the General Assembly, with credentials that allowed me unrestricted access.

However important the documentation of meetings, during the past month and a half, I've heard about child labor and prostitution in third world countries, children soldiering in Sierra Leone and the fight for independence in East Timor, in discussions in the Security Council and General Assembly. I've heard Xanana Gusmao, the President of the National Council of Timorese Resistance, recently releasted from prison, give a first hand account of violence in his nation. UN Peacekeeping, UN World Food Programme, UNICEF (the UN Childrens' Fund), ILO (International Labor Organization) and many other programs are actually doing something about these issues, yet there is little visual evidence in the UN photo department to suggest that anything else goes on here besides meetings and treaty signings. Members of the staff do go on missions, but they appear to be infrequent.

I am not a photojournalist here, it is true, for this duration. That 's the newspapers' job, I've been told. But guess what? The newspapers aren't doing a great job of sending their staffers on assignment. Look at who is taking the pictures in Kosovo, or East Timor, or Sierra Leone.

They are FREELANCERS! Freelancers who are putting their lives on the line, I'm assuming, for newspapers or agencies who might even be paying a reasonable sum for the pictures. But my guess is that many of them have paid their own way, paid their own life and health insurance, and have worked largely on spec. So it's hard to find too much fault with the UN, a news-making organization, when the news-disseminating organizations aren't sending out their own photographers to document world events.

The potential for storytelling at the UN is enormous. Yet the daily assignment requests invariably include meetings, flagshots and treaty signings. They tend to get old, very quickly.

When I complained to my husband recently about the lack of creativity in my assignments, he reminded me of a time, not too long ago when I was considering leaving photojournalism to sell shoes, in part because of the unpredictability of work and lack of decent financial remuneration. The UN is unlikely to renew my contract at the end of the year, not because I haven't done the job I was asked to do, but because there won't be enough work to warrant my being here, not unless they start sending out photographers to the field, to document what it is the UN does.

In the meantime, I still get excited about events here at the United Nations. It's a place I've always wanted to work (journals forthcoming) and notwithstanding the dearth of challenging assignments in the here and now, I'm looking for my own pictures behind the scenes. When one has at least a living wage, it's a lot easier to look for the interesting stuff when you know you can pay your bills. This is not to excuse the powers that be for not demanding that the stories be told officially. But, short of that, there are stories right here, in this building. I intend to find some of them before I leave in December.

On an unrelated topic, but one more closely related to newspaper photography, I think one of the reasons we news photographers are so happy about what we do is that we enjoy a certain amount of autonomy in our picture taking. Generally speaking, an assignment editor trusts our judgment in our interpretation of an event or depiction of a personality. At the other end, there may be a different editor who may not have been involved in the assigning, and who may have other ideas of what s/he is looking for in a picture.

Last summer, while shooting a mid-morning assignment, an editor paged me to ask if I'd be available to shoot a late afternoon feature at 4 pm on Mambo dancing at the Grand Concourse and 161^st Street in the Bronx, following the Bronx Puerto Rican Day Parade. Since the Mambo shots were features for the following day's paper, he said to get in and out quickly with a couple of usable shots, and to bring in the day's take from both assignments, when I was finished.

After my assignment, I went on to kill some time shooting weather features; by the time I got to the Grand Concourse at 4 pm, it was still 100 degrees and there were 10,000 people at the Mambo festival, all of whom seemed better suited to the tropical heat than I.

I got what I considered some pretty decent shots and was ready to leave when a man without identification approached me and asked me for whom I was shooting. When I told him, he said, AWell, the important shots are going to come around 6 pm when they announce the three finalists."

He introduced himself as a vice president of marketing for the paper and said that I HAD to get these shots. I told him that with all due respect, that not what I had been told by the photo desk and that I had already gotten pictures from the event and I was on my way back downtown.

He called the photo desk on his cell phone, and the same editor who had told me to get in and out, and back downtown to the newsroom, asked me to hang around and do what he said.

The bottom line is that I had to satisfy a marketing directive with my Mambo shot, which ran in the next day's paper. In looking back, I thought of how I'd resented the marketing person's influence in what ran in the paper, and how lucky we are most of the time to be working alone with our own vision, and without someone continually looking over our shoulder.

The face of photojournalism is changing and much of it is not for the better. I had a conversation with an editor recently, during which we were discussing the various changes, both technical and financial, in our business. The thing is, I was talking with a "word" person and his view was vastly different than mine.

He said, and I quote: "Newspapers will always need staff writers because, after all, we write copy that takes time, whereas a picture takes only a second or two."

This pervasive attitude insinuating that only a moron, or someone with a point and shoot can take a meaningful picture is endlessly irritating. But he's wrong about newspapers needing staff writers. I fear his career, like many photojournalists I know, may be in jeopardy if he continues his way of thinking. Newspapers are relying on freelancers more and more because they've found they can cut their bottom line with a paltry day rate with no benefits. Consider this:

The day before I started my job at the UN, I went over to one of the newspapers where I've enjoyed working to say my (though temporary) goodbye's. Before I left, I was handed a freelance contract, limiting resales and intellectual property rights. It proposed extending the newspaper's once "one time reproduction rights only" to web use and advertising as needed without further compensation and demanded that photographers ask permission of the newspaper to use the pictures after they ran in the paper, even though it stipulated that the photographers still owned copyright. While to date, no freelancer I know has signed the contract and the paper has backed off, it's only a matter of time before another less ambiguous one is drawn up. And it's only a matter of time before this kind of thinking trickles down to staff photographers and staff writers.

Getting back to pictures of handshakes and headshots. At this point in my life, much as I love and miss the challenge of daily newspaper assignments, I will find it difficult to go back to the constant worry over coyright, the constant challenge, not of daily assignments, but of where they're coming from. In a dwindling market, I'm happy for the moment to have a job taking pictures. I should only be so lucky come January 1.

Behind the Viewfinder - A Year in the Life of Photojournalism
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