Sometimes a picture from the back, or simply a close-up of a man's hands, will tell more than words ever could. Writers and photographers use different inputs, of course, to arrive at the same point to tell or amplify the identical story or moment. As a result, and when one thinks of light as a language, our profession suffers from a terrible rate of visual illiteracy. We are assigning pictures that were out of date even when they were invented, at a time when television is making great visual inroads. Much is said these days about newspapers becoming daily magazines in order to compete better for the readers' attention and interest.
Variety is the operative word.
The growing spread of op-ed pages is a welcome sign of space available. Like most photographers, I'm pretty much satisfied with the amount of space allotted to photographs. Rather, it is their form and content that bother me. All too often he's right. In the big year-end photojournalism contests only about 20 percent of each year's winners have ever seen the light of day.