Photos From The First Few Weeks

This photo made it into the Asheville Citizen Times. 

The Beginning

The last few weeks have been a blur of introductions, questions, figuring out how I fit in, and crafting my internships to get the best experience I can. I have spent my time archiving, editing, and uploading photos. It’s interesting to be in a career-focused environment where I can really get a taste of what it means to be a “photojournalist”. In the past, I had always thought of a photojournalist as someone who attends special events and walks around asking people to “smile” or “pose for the camera”. I never looked at photojournalism from an artistic standpoint. This investigation is going to be the center point for how I craft my internship this summer. I am going to use my experiences to come up with a better definition for photojournalism. 

In the text, Visual Culture by Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall, photojournalism is defined as having the ability to present an image as “factual evidence of an actual state of affairs” (44). I think this is a pretty easy to agree with definition because most of us have looked at a newspaper or magazine and seen the cover photo that practically sums up the entire story below. The image is supposed to grab out attention, make us want to read more and discover more. As Evans and Stuart explain “all communication takes place on the basis of signs (44). The signs are the things that draw us in. We relate to something within the image, and want to further investigate.  

However, I think there is something more to photojournalism then simply capturing the reality of a situation. In my internship with the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project (ASAP for short), I spend a vast amount of time out in the field, or tailgate markets, speaking to customers, farmers and other interns. The majority of what I take photos of is based upon those stories that I am told. For example, at one market I began speaking to two older women who had a gorgeous display of recycled dishes that they had made into lawn ornaments. I asked them how long they had been making them (about a year), how they were inspired (a link sent to them by one of their daughters), and how they create these sculptures (with plenty of disagreement). Had I not stopped and talked to these women I more than likely would have thought the sculptures were kinda gaudy and not very artistic... that would have been my “reality”. So I think that when the text says that photojournalism is capturing reality, or “truth” they are overlooking how many different definitions of truth there can be, and how these definitions change as we get to know the subject.