Eye Magazine

In publications of this calibre, with thousands of pictures, there should have been many more images with this kind of power. But so many of these colour photos are dispiritingly bland. In an era when the public is supposedly fixated on celebrity, everything is about personalities and the portrait has become the mainstay of contemporary visual journalism. Yet these portraits, whether they show someone famous or an ordinary person, lack strong character as images. The figure will usually be presented in the middle-ground. The light tends to be even, flat, descriptive: it is given no role in defining form or suggesting the person’s depths or drama. There often seems to be only a minimal attempt to compose the picture, and visual surprises – unusual viewpoints, angles, shapes and details – are avoided. The surrounding environment, the subject’s work space or kitchen, is presented as ‘information’ in the same neutral, faux anthropological manner. The picture cannot escape being some kind of interpretation, but what these images mainly offer is their timidity in the face of the subject, their reluctance to make an authorial statement by risking a point of view.

The same blandness and lack of clear journalistic purpose also afflicts more obviously newsworthy subjects. A feature in the Telegraph Magazine about students facing an uncertain future in Swindon opens with a shot (by Mark Power) of the town centre. The image is static and uninteresting in content and drab in colour, its inexpressive flatness recalling the detached, ‘objective’ style of so much contemporary art photography. The picture certainly conveys a feeling of sterility, even hopelessness once you start to think about it, but it offers viewers no identification with the subject, no warmth. This un-enticing visual hook is followed by three more shots of the town – one shows five luckless students posing in microscopic long shot on an outdoor staircase – accompanied by pull-quotes working hard to provide a context for pictures that do little on their own to involve readers in the students’ plight, or to make them care.

This must, after all, be the reason for publishing such a story. As the French critic Christian Caujolle argues in Things as They Are (2005), a superb collection of photojournalism since 1955, it is only by creating a more incisive photojournalism that mass-market magazines will be able to offer a unique position that truly competes with TV and the internet. ‘If that is to happen,’ he writes, ‘greater attention and analysis must be devoted to every stage of the process that results in the production of meaning, including the choice of photographer, the selection of the images, the organisation of the sequence and its graphic development, always bearing in mind that typography, like layout, affects the way photographs are interpreted. It is absolutely essential that we continue to ask the fundamental questions: for whom am I publishing these images? What is the point of view I am seeking to express, to render intelligible?’

The essential principles that should guide any newspaper or magazine designer working with photographs are plainly stated in this quotation. The problem with many publications clearly starts from the failure to answer Caujolle’s final questions in any way other than ‘celebrity worship’, ‘fashion’ or ‘stuff to buy’. This can be seen in a lifestyle title such as GQ, which prides itself on being the home of intelligent writing for men without seeing the contradiction. GQ’s strongest visual statements in its July issue – the meaning it is really producing – are a set of pictures of the actress Megan Fox (its cover story) and a set of surfer swimwear pictures. Both come with the usual supplier and price lists for the models’ clothes.

The issue contains nothing remotely comparable in social awareness to the abrasive, compelling ‘Gun Nation’ photo-essay about American gun culture by photographer Zed Nelson, which GQ published in 1998 when Tony Chambers was art director. ‘It was genuinely fascinating, disturbing and thought-provoking,’ says Jeremy Leslie, who shows it in his book magCulture (2003).

‘The obsession with celebrity is a major factor generally in the positioning of magazines,’ Leslie continues, ‘and photographically who needs an expensive and complex shoot when a cheap paparazzi shot is all that’s required? The stories themselves are dictated by these images. A whole industry has built up around providing pap images for the celebrity weeklies and, increasingly, the monthlies use the same images, too.’

Only in The Guardian, and in the Spectrum section at the back of The Sunday Times Magazine, once home to some of the finest photo-journalism, are there occasional reminders of the intensively researched and costly to produce photographic essays that most British magazines long ago ceased to provide. The Spectrum section I looked at included six pictures by the photojournalist Patrick Barth, who spent three weeks flying with the US air-ambulance squad in Afghanistan. Barth’s shots are a poignant example of the kind of report that could often be seen in news magazines in the 1960s and 70s. Nevertheless, his pictures are second on the bill, after a tacky set of photos of burlesque artists posing at home, and they feel a little squeezed, their scaling against each other and placement on the page less certain than it could have been.

Elsewhere, though, my survey confirmed that papers that once knew how to identify a visual story, source excellent pictures and present them on the page in gripping visual narratives have completely forgotten how to do it. In the early 1990s, The Independent Magazine, where Colin Jacobson was picture editor, constructed superb photographic essays, usually in black and white, about subjects such as Ceausescu’s legacy in Romania, a Russian women’s prison, and an AIDS ward in Zimbabwe. The paper’s once sure instincts are nowhere to be found in a story about the twentieth anniversary of German reunification published in June. The opening spread pairs a black-and-white picture from 1961, showing a defecting East German solider leaping the barbed wire, with a present-day shot of the same street, where tourists are visiting a cold war memorial. The older picture, a remarkable news moment, is shown too small on the spread to transmit its full drama, while the over-scaled picture of a group of teenagers milling about has no more information, drama or interest than a casual snapshot. No meaningful relationship has been achieved between the two pictures.

While publishers and editors must take the blame for succumbing to the values and imperatives of an increasingly narrow and culturally damaging obsession with vacuous celebrity and consumer lifestyle, designers have also contributed to the decline in standards of photographic practice, if only through ignorance. Photography was pushed to the side, as an essential concern of the graphic designer, in the digital type revolution of the early 1990s, and, as image-making, too, went digital, it has never recovered its place. Few designers now see their primary task in terms of the ‘production of meaning’ by choice of photographer, selection of images and the organisation of sequence. Looking through contemporary manuals of graphic design, photography receives little attention. In Graphic Design: The New Basics (2008) by Ellen Lupton and Jennifer Cole Phillips, for instance, an otherwise thorough and popular guide, the authors allot the subject only a few brief entries. Pattern, on the other hand, a specifically graphic, largely decorative and mostly fashionable concern, has an entire chapter.

As software enables ever more intricate and rococo page designs, the graphic aspects of page construction increasingly preoccupy designers. ‘I think there is a perceived notion that good editorial design means lots of design,’ says Richard Turley, art director of The Guardian’s G2 section, ‘lots of intricate elements, lots of typefaces, and concept after concept. Often photography gets lost in that fiddle, with pictures getting a bit overwhelmed by it.’ GQ’s pages are cluttered with this kind of stylish but editorially redundant paraphernalia.

Turley dismisses his own design education, crediting Mark Porter, The Guardian’s creative director, with teaching him about the use of imagery, pacing a story and the importance of scale. He points to a tradition of editorial art direction (‘we’re still standing on their shoulders’) that includes Willy Fleckhaus, Michael Rand, David King, Pearce Marchbank, Fred Woodward and Tibor Kalman – also a crucial figure for Porter, who worked with Kalman on Colors. It comes as no great surprise that both Porter and Turley cite Pictures on a Page: Photojournalism, Graphics and Picture Editing (1978) by Harold Evans, editor of The Sunday Times for fourteen years, as a key influence on their approach to working with photographs. Evans’ book is a masterpiece, the best study of this subject ever written; it should be required reading for designers, yet, as Turley points out, it is a book that few designers seem to know about.

Porter encountered Pictures on a Page in the mid-1980s. ‘I think I had a vague instinct about this before, but reading Harry Evans taught me that the narrative is at the heart of every good picture decision,’ he says. ‘I still remember the examples he gave about how the meaning of a picture changes with the composition, use on the page and – especially – cropping, and I’ve been putting those lessons into practice for over twenty years. Pictures on a Page helped me understand that in the editorial environment the picture is not a finished artefact, but a raw material.’

Cropping is a vital tool for refining images and constructing narratives, yet today it appears to be a declining art. Turley observes that the activity is ‘really overlooked now, considered to be a skill you just pick up, or maybe even not much of a skill at all’. Evans devotes 50 pages and many pictures to the possibilities of picture editing and creative cropping, and to cropping problems that might arise. Graphic Design: The New Basics assigns a single page, three photos and just 120 words to the subject.

The reasons for this neglect are as much technological as cultural and they impose awkward restrictions, even on publications as sensitive to the possibilities of photography as The Guardian. ‘Some of the digital images we now work with,’ says Porter, ‘particularly in newspapers, barely have the resolution to fill the space we need them to, so we simply don’t have the option of cropping them significantly, otherwise the resolution wouldn’t be up to it. The fact that so many are compressed JPEGs makes it worse. So digital technology has taken away one of the picture editor’s (or art director’s) most powerful tools for working with pictures.’

Magazine pages used to be constructed around photographs that were carefully selected, cropped and sized to tell the story. Too often now the pictures are relegated to a subordinate role. Images are dropped into predetermined boxes on InDesign templates and cropped to fit this frame (where cropping is possible) rather than cropped for narrative reasons.

‘I believe that every element on a page – writing, imagery, design – has to combine to tell the story of the piece,’ says Leslie, ‘but, sadly, too many times on the newsstand the magazines use imagery to fill a predefined space. This is the same as pouring text into text boxes without reading it. It’s just space-filling.’

The ‘space-filling’ problem is just as acute on the Web. The finely judged placement of one picture against another, and the dynamic visual and semantic relationships potentially achievable within the fixed frame of the page, are the first casualties online. On screen, the multiple diagonal axes of the asymmetrical page are replaced by the unvarying vertical axis of the single column, seen most typically in blogs where all the pictures within the main column are sized to fit the column width. As you scroll down, the photos ascend into view one at a time: each image has more or less the same visual weight and the narrative, where there is one at all, can be read in only two directions: down and up, forward and back. The photo galleries popular on newspaper websites are no better. Here, the images must conform to approximately the same size and position, irrespective of the nature of their content or degree of interest, and on this horizontal axis, which is closer to a constrained form of television than it is to the flexibility of the printed page, each new image wipes away the last.

I wish I could have found more in my survey of newsstand magazines to excite me. I hoped the exercise wouldn’t confirm what I felt to be the case before I began. At a time when we are deluged with more photographic images than ever, we seem to have lost faith in the power of the photograph to express anything other than our personal reality. We don’t take the production of meaning seriously and we use pictures with less fluency and purpose than earlier generations of editors, photographers, designers and readers. We don’t know what we are trying to say, and we don’t know who we are saying it for. We would rather not pay for the photographer’s expertise and commitment, we don’t believe in the photographer’s mission, and we don’t think it is likely to have any effect. Yet we take our pictures, regardless, and pour them into our boxes. Lacking a clearly defined purpose, rejecting the need to reveal and reform, our ocean of photos still tells us uncomfortable stories about who we are now.

Rick Poynor, writer, Eye founder, research fellow, Royal College of Art

First published in Eye no. 73 vol. 19 2009

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues.