By Charlie Devereux
Video: the new Photo?
In ten years time the still photograph will be obsolete and all photojournalists will be become film makers. This is the prediction of Dirck Halstead, the eccentric founder and editor of the Digital Journalist, an online photography magazine.
Halstead was speaking at a symposium on the subject of "Photojournalism: when the subject becomes an object" yesterday afternoon.
His argument is that the increasing use of the internet as a news source will force commercial newspapers to prioritise their web outlets ahead of print and that the demand online will be for moving images ahead of stills.
But how will the print versions illustrate their stories? Halstead has the answer to this. He believes that impending technology will mean that screen grabs will have reached a sufficient quality to be used in place of traditional stills.
He also believes that the new widescreen format that these still shots will come in will radically change the format of print publications; the spine will be located along the top or bottom, not on the left (or right if you are in Japan). But that's another story.
The general mood in the festival seems to be of an industry struggling to keep up with technological and sociological change. Everywhere you look you get the impression that people are thinking: how will this change affect my livelihood?
And the symposium seemed a little weighted in this direction. So discussion about citizen journalists ('the subjects who become objects' )and the opportunities for audience participation that the internet provides became a discussion about its cleverness as a marketing tool.
The preoccupation with its effect on the industry seems to be stifling genuine debate and a proper discussion of what is best for the audience.
Staying on the commercial theme, there was an interesting presentation by the photojournalist Vincent Rosenblatt who has set up a participatory photography agency / training centre in the favelas of Rio. He gives cameras and teaches photography street children.
It's a practice that's becoming increasingly popular but the difference with Olhares do Morro is that the emphasis is on providing a living for the young photographers above advocacy work.
The debate continues today and I'm looking forward to hearing Manoocher Deghati, founder of Aina, a school for photojournalism in Kabul, Afghanistan that doubles up as one of the few non-western photo agencies.
