Sunday 21 October 2012

Who to say what? – Wedding Photojournalism!





I believe that Photojournalism is a divine practice for a photographer. It has many other kinds including a very popular type of it which is Wedding Photojournalism.  Its key word is story which is told by the photojournalist in many frames or rarely in one composed image.  

A shudder is observed; I saw an intimating photograph of a newly married couple clicked by famous Emirates based photography team with a caption “United we stand, divided we fall. What? Is it working for such moment; on such subject to claim this is “wedding photojournalistic photography(according to the photographer) ”?

The dilemma starts with more than half  of photographers I know personally or generally, even doesn’t have a clue what to call themselves.  Some says they are pioneer in wedding photojournalism, and some do not fear God and again claimed a normal random (not candid) picture, as photojournalism.

Teddy a brilliant photographer says, “By simply taking photographs of ‘whatever is going on’ is not photojournalism.”

I have been on the social media since almost eight years. Today it has been more than half of decade that we can see facebook pages for commercializing and self-promotion. And I think every third page is a photographer’s page. Wanna be or a professional. In the while I have gone through many pages to which I do visit but often “Like!”, and the reason is simple to hear but difficult to bear.

I usually try to stay on the page for a little longer then in reality I do, but what makes it seriously offensive is jumbling of labels and it feels being imposed to accept what you are being told by the page owner. It is frustrating that even you know what’s real you cannot educate the service provider because he or she is not in your approach or sometimes that’s a competitor. Than what we decide is simply to Go Green, put this creative-humanistic approach behind and provide quality work to the clients, a work which is nice, relevant and above all correct!

It seems that if you do not agree with these photographers they will shoot you in head.

Some photographers are only here to plan a trap for clients. They show them some pictures taken by using different camera techniques and claim the photographs as photo-journalistic. Somebody ask them if a shot of DOF (depth of field) had the whole of photojournalism then where has the basic technique gone? Or have they decided to give it another unsorted name like they did to the "Photo-journalistic-wedding-photo-graphy"?

……… Give it a thought ;)

In the next post I will talk about this battle of Real Wedding Photojournalism and Pakistani photojournalistic wedding photography.

Nos vemos pronto!!