The importance of photojournalism

Joanna Pitman discusses the changing nature of photojournalism in The Times in an era of camera phones in every other pocket and soldier-generated content from the front lines of every other war,

“People like Philip Jones Griffiths and Larry Burrows made amazing bodies of work in Vietnam,” says the photojournalist Tom Stoddart. “But after that the authorities clamped down heavily and photographers became embedded. Pictures come from elsewhere. Sometimes they come from within, such as the Abu Ghraib pictures. No journalist could have written a thousand words that would have persuaded Donald Rumsfeld to go on TV to apologise for that.” link

Images come from a far wider range of sources than ever before which means the need for editorial standards, verification and analysis has never been more important.