Monastery in Tblisi, Georgia. Photo: Paolo Pellegrin/ Magnum/ Georgian Spring
As magazines and newspapers cut costs for production, competition among photographers is rising and publication on the internet doesn’t generate enough income, photoagencies try to approach new ways to fund and publish projects. The most recent examples are Consequences by Noor and Georgian Spring by Magnum.
In the forerun to the United Nations Climate Change Conference eight Noor photographers cover current affects of climate change from Greenland over Sudan to Canada. Among others Oxfam, Greenpeace and Nikon are partners for this project. (Edit: Funding only comes from Nikon.) It will first be published exhibited during the Conference.
Blackfields, Poland. Photo: Pep Bonet/ Noor/ Consequences
One year after the war in Georgia ten Magnum photographers went there for a project called Georgian Spring. Beautiful images of an equally beautiful country. The website is really sophistcated showing the skill of the Magnum multimedia department. Georgian spring was funded by the Georgian Ministry of Culture with support of President Mikheil Saakashvili.
Consequences and Georgian Spring are not limited to the internet. It’s just one outlet among many. Magnum published a book and there will be a travelling exhibition for both projects along with publications in traditional media. I think this is a great development and might well show the future for ambitious photojournalistic projects.
But as great as these projects may look, journalistically they are questionable. Georgian President Saakashvili will surely not fund anything that’s overly critical of his policies. And if you work for NGOs (regardless of how good their aims may be) you won’t publish anything that’s contradictory to their mission. You can basically say that Consequences and especially Georgian Spring are very sophisticated public relations projects. (Edit: I stand corrected, this doesn’t apply to Consequences. See Nina’s comment below.)
I guess for Magnum, VII, Noor and many other agencies this might be the only way to survive in the coming years. And the image of journalistic independency is probably just that – an idealistic image. Now the influences are just more obvious. I think it’s okay as long as it is clearly stated who funded these projects, as long as you don’t sell it as independent journalism or – if published in a journalistic context – put it into critical perspective in the accompanying text.
In any case, I enjoyed looking at them.
[...] (Via Daniel Etter’s blog, who brings up a good point regarding the funding and publication of photojournalism outside the traditional journalistic publication model. As mentioned with Magnum’s Georgia project here and elsewhere, new funding sources for photojournalism don’t come without strings attached. Photojournalism funded primarily by or in concert with NGOs and advocacy organizations can quite easily turn into a propaganda tool for advancing an agenda. That isn’t a good thing, no matter how admirable the goals of the agenda. Claims of (photo)journalistic objectivity rarely get far, but there’s a difference between the New York Times sending a reporter out to investigate a topic and Doctors Without Borders or UNICEF sending a photographer to document what they’re doing. If photojournalism is perceived to only ever advance some agenda or another, it loses value as a tool for communication and information about the world. I don’t mean to discount any work commissioned by these organizations or the work in Noor’s Consequences; these sorts of projects (like VII’s partnership with the Red Cross) fill a vital role informing the public, prospective donors, NGO boards of directors, etc., of the work done by the organizations and the need for more funding. In a future of NGO-funded documentary work, photographers and agencies must make sure that editorial control of the shoot and of subsequent publication of the images remains as neutral as possible. For more information about photography funded by or about NGOs, head over to A Developing Story.) This was written by M. Scott Brauer. Posted on Monday, November 9, 2009, at 6:23 am. Filed under Events, Exhibitions, Links, News, Pictures, Worth a look, discussion, ethics. Tagged editorial control, ethics, funding, future, ngos, noor, noor images. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback. [...]
A point of clarification….Funding for the proudction of Consequences by NOOR was provided exclusively by Nikon and not by NGOs. NGOs are helping with distribution of the materials in Copenhagen.
Thanks for the clarifaction, Nina. I edited the post.
[...] can really be much more than just the sum of its members. (I wrote more about Consequences here.) Way to [...]