Photojournalism and Art — Where is the dividing line?

What is real in photography? More specifically, when we look at a photo, what in it is real? Some of us think about these questions often, but even if we don’t, every once in a while we see a photograph that leaves us without an escape route. We simply have to ask.

Consider Philippe Halsman’s “Dali Atomicus,” a surreal photograph that is made up entirely of real, tangible things: cats, water, paintings, chairs, and a smiling Salvador Dali. Yet the moment we look at it, we know something’s not right. Cats are flying, water is suspended in mid-air, a chair is floating and Dali is levitating as he’s painting. Because these things don’t happen in real life, we know right away that everything in the photo has been manipulated. We just don’t know how.

Well, it’s simple, really. On the count of “four,” Dali jumped up, the photographer’s wife held up the chair, and his assistants threw three cats and a bucket of water into the air. After a few hours and several dozen tries, Halsman probably decided that he had enough material to work with. (And the cats most likely got tired of being airborne and wet.)

In the end, Halsman made a work of art—or at least that’s what we determine it to be. Do we consider it a work of art because it’s not communicating any single or conspicuous truth? Or, do we not look for such a truth because we prejudge it as a work of art? As the latter question gnaws on the tail of the former, we can skip that semantic cannibalism by acknowledging something about our own feelings toward “Dali Atomicus”: The fact that everything in the photo has been made to defy logic and gravity doesn’t bother us. We actually enjoy the product. And if we don’t enjoy it, we at least have no ethical objection to the blatant manipulation of people and things.

But when it comes to journalism, we do not have such a relaxed ethic. Is there anyone who would consider “Dali Atomicus” a work of journalism? I doubt it. Well, why not? Whether it’s because we think the photo is art and art only or because it purposely manipulates us—this cannibalistic python is similar to the one in the above paragraph—matters much less than our view of journalism. Photojournalism is supposed to answer the question “What happened?” with a picture (and maybe a short caption). A simple example would be a New York Times photo of President Bush during an important speech. Yes, there were probably dozens of photos taken and The Times ended up using just one. But most people are aware that a photograph is a moment in time. The photograph may also have been cropped. Again, people are aware of that. Selecting a good photograph and cropping are not the same as manipulation.

There is, however, a long, slippery spectrum between artistic and journalistic photography. Picking out one photo of Bush from a dozen nearly identical ones doesn’t compare to picking out one Iraq War photo out of hundreds to put on the front page. In the latter case, the process of selection itself can arguably entail manipulation—whether it’s intentional or not is another question. Whatever the case, there is at least an attempt to point out what happened. But doesn’t artistic photography sometimes point that out as well? It does. Yet it doesn’t have to.

The Halsman photograph and the hypothetical one of Bush are obviously on the opposite ends of the art-journalism spectrum. For every unique characteristic that’s exclusive to one side, there are probably dozens that are important and indispensable to both. There are also countless journalistic photographs with artistic aspects, and there are countless artistic photographs with journalistic aspects. And some photographs simply put all these concepts in a blender and leave us with a soggy mess. Yet, it is important to keep the spectrum in mind when discussing photography, because what a given photo says is undeniably connected to the language that was involved in its creation.