If news stories have their accepted norms, so, too, do the photographs that are used to illustrate them. Convention demands head shots at desks, officials-disembarking-from-a-plane shots, men-at-podium shots – nothing too idiosyncratic and certainly nothing too ‘artistic’. And yet there is something to be gained if the photographer who has come out to Kampala with the author breaks the rules in order to capture both the shocked look in the prime minister’s eyes in the split second after he is asked a blunt question by a reporter and the female assistant whom he has instructed to record us while we record him, perhaps as an implicit reminder that he holds the keys to the torture cells situated, according to Amnesty International, in the basement of the building we are in.
Stuart Franklin, Brass Instruments, Independence Celebrations, Hoima, Uganda, 2012.
(picture credit 7.4)
Good photographs compress extended themes into single images: they can speak of the whole nation’s endemic corruption simply by showing us a few men waiting idly in the lobby of a luxury hotel, or of its extreme poverty by focusing on a musician’s battered tuba at a parade celebrating (though that might not be quite the word for it) the fiftieth anniversary of Ugandan independence.
7.
IN HIS POEM ‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower’ (1955), the American poet William Carlos Williams famously wrote:
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
The bit about ‘dying’ is, naturally, an overstatement. What Williams fears is that without regular contact with poetry, we may lose our vitality, cease to understand ourselves, neglect our powers of empathy or become unimaginative, brittle and sterile. Literature, for Williams as for George Eliot before him, is the medium that can reawaken us to the world. The news may have an intense surface seriousness – which sensible people naturally imagine gives it a greater claim over our attention than verse could ever hope to command – but the artist recognizes its dangerously anaesthetizing effects.
Pupil of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c. 1565.
(picture credit 7.5)
Yet this equation – poetry as life, news as death – is no permanent law; it isn’t the category of ‘news’ itself that is at fault, for in its essence the word doesn’t signify anything more specific than that which is happening in the world at a given moment. It isn’t news per se that is the problem, only the ‘life’-inhibiting version of it that too often abounds. However, if Tolstoy, Flaubert or Sophocles were in the newsroom, the medium might well give us rather more of what we need in order to keep our souls from ‘dying’, for what were War and Peace, Madame Bovary and Antigone in their original state but just the things that William Carlos Williams so unfairly attacked – namely, news events?
8.
SOME SIXTEEN YEARS before the publication of ‘Asphodel’, W. H. Auden had taken his readers to Brussels in his own poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, placing them in front of Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, a painting long thought to be by Bruegel but now attributed to one of his pupils.
The painting shows us a superficially bucolic scene: ships are taking sail, a shepherd is tending to his flock, distant cities look prosperous and ordered. But in the bottom right-hand corner of the canvas, a tragedy is unfolding all but unheeded (the headlines, had there been any, would have been about something else that day): reckless Icarus, having allowed the sun to melt the wax of his homemade wings, has just tumbled into the sea, to his death. A resolute ploughman at the centre of the picture references a popular proverb, ‘No plough stops for the dying man.’
The detail.
(picture credit 7.6)
Not many people have noticed Icarus – but the painter and now the poet have. This, Auden wants to tell us, is what artists do: they notice stuff; the small and unobtrusive stuff that other people – ploughmen and shepherds, you and me, and journalists in a hurry – miss and yet that is essential to halting our usual indifference and callousness.
9.
WE NEED A kind of foreign news that hangs more tenaciously on the details, a news that ignites our interest in events by remaining open to some of the lessons of art, a news that lets the poets, the travel writers and the novelists impart aspects of their crafts to journalists – and perhaps occasionally even lets them have a desk of their own somewhere in the quieter corners of the newsroom – so that we won’t so regularly be able to walk blithely past the planet’s less obtrusive beauty and tragedy.
Photography
A generic President Barack Obama (Getty Images).
(picture credit 8.1)
1.
THERE IS NO more oppressed or put-upon figure in the newsrooms of the modern world than the photo editor. Responsible for coordinating the visual aspect of news output, the men and women who fill this position almost always repeat (out of earshot of their bosses) the identical complaint: ‘No one believes in photography any more.’
This is not to say that no photographs are employed to illustrate the news; far from it. There are now more images than ever before embedded in the coverage we consume. The problem lies in the lack of ambition behind their production and display. Photographs are still used, but the arguments for taking, identifying and then paying for the best examples appear to have been forgotten. A great majority of the pictures that do make it into print are compressed, bland, repetitive, clichéd and sidelined, and are seen, unsurprisingly, as nothing more than blocks of colour that can break up monochromatic runs of text.
We might usefully divide news photographs into two genres. The first are images of corroboration, which do little other than confirm something we have learned about a person or an event through an accompanying article. So if a story informs us that the president gave a speech, a photograph will appear to one side verifying just this. The idea here is that photography should just furnish an extra level of proof as to the reality of events which have already been described in language.
Then there is another, rarer kind of image, the photograph of revelation, whose ambition is not simply to back up what the text tells us but to advance our level of knowledge to a new point. It sets out to challenge cliché.