In 1990, I was appointed the first Picture Editor of the Guardian after conducting months of training exercises and evaluation of their systems. I’ve had the opportunity to work on three newspaper photographic departments over the course of my career. Part of the reason is that quality pursues quality. I can’t think of a single photographer of significant quality and promise who has joined a newspaper in Trinidad and Tobago in the last decade as anything other than an occasional contributor. They’re happy to pursue that day’s worth of buzz and will put their work into a print publication, but showing up for work and plugging away at photojournalism day in and day out simply isn’t on the agenda for most of today’s young photographers. It dawned on me recently that not one of the better young photographers that I’m aware of would ever consider a career as a newspaper photographer.
In a single day, your work can be seen by thousands of people, but there’s little feedback, the drug that drives online participation in photography and more specifically photosharing. Getting published in a local publication still carries some potent cachet. I was already being published, but the introduction into the arcana behind the scenes soon became almost as intriguing and I soon put together my own nighttime only darkroom.Ī computer with a pirated copy of Lightroom and Photoshop packs more image adjustment horsepower than any photographer in even the finest lab had available to them as recently as a decade ago.Īnd as for publishing? Well I shouldn’t have to mention the power of the web, Facebook and Flickr, should I? What began as a purely functional exercise - and I really didn’t care how the photos got done at first - became an obsession that drove me to find out more about photography and the mechanics of the process. I wanted photos to go along with my stories, but I soon began ducking into the darkroom to catch a look at the process whenever I could. I did my first photographs at the Express 35 years ago for a different reason. In 2011, neither of these reasons is enough to bring a curious young photographer to a newsroom anymore. You either wanted to learn the craft or get published. Why would a young photographer have shown up in a newsroom looking for work two decades ago? It would be one of two reasons and usually a subtle mix of the two. I don’t think it will be the overall capacity and quality of the reporting resource that’s going to get hit first, the big dent will come first in newspaper photo departments. I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at the changes that are taking place in newsrooms and considering the future of reporting, but I think that I’ve missed something. At the Wire's photodesk in 2002 with Keith Matthews, who's busy showing contestants in the Miss PSA beauty competition the photographs he's taken of them.
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