Thinking about the demise of Oeil Public and the reasons photojournalism is in such a squeese I was offered a perfect example by a friend. The Norwegian public broadcaster NRK shows us just how little they care about pictures in a piece about violence in Nigeria. According to a story 460 people were killed in the town of Jos, in clashes between Christians and Muslims.
In the "good ol' days" there would be a picture editor working to find a great picture to go with the story, making sure text and picture(s) were both linked and complementing each other. One would perhaps think the nations biggest news organization (NRK) would have both the resources and professionalism to aim for the same? Apparently not.
NRK is happy to use an old picture, from a different part of the country, showing a totally unrelated event to "illustrate" what is going on in Jos. NRK has taken a great news photo, which won an award in World Press Photo, and reduced it to an "illustration." Of course they don't bother to tell their readers this, the caption reads as part of the story from Jos. Not a single hint that this picture has nothing to do with religion or violence in Jos. I'm thinking someone at NRK said " It's a black man. It's Nigeria. It's dramatic. That'll do!"
NRK has devaluated photojournalism so much they might as well have have used a picture drawn by my three year old daughter!
So it is no wonder photographers are struggling to make a living when even "serious" media is so uninterested in having relevant pictures to go with their stories they just grab anything that resembles what their text is dealing with.
Now, if you wonder about this picture: it was taken by Akintunde Akinleye and this is his own caption:
- A Nigerian rinses soot from his face at the scene of a petroleum gas pipeline
explosion near Nigeria's commercial capital Lagos, Tuesday, December 26, 2006. - A ruptured petroleum pipeline burst into flames while scavengers were collecting fuel from the underground pipeline punctured overnight by an armed gang who siphoned fuel into road tankers, leaving behind a stream of stray petroleum gasoline for hundreds of resident scavengers. The Red Cross said the fire killed at least 269 people and injured dozens that were trapped and burnt on the ground next to a ramshackle automobile workshop and a saw-mill in the densely populated district of Abule-Egba, an outskirt of Nigeria’s commercial capital, Lagos.
- Nigeria, Africa oil giant, is the eight largest producer of crude oil in the world and its earnings soared by the rise in the world market, allowing it to build up to 40 billion US Dollars by the end of 2006; but it is also one of the world poorest countries with a large number of its 140 million people enduring extreme poverty amid widespread graft that makes a handful of people wealthy.
This inequality motivates those who sabotage oil pipelines and the villagers who pilfer the fuel for sale in the black market where it is sold three-fold. - While the response of the emergency fire service equipped with leaking water hoses
delayed, other villagers assisted in using water collected in buckets, to subdue the fire that lasted four hours.
Reuters,
Lagos, Nigeria
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