Photo Journalism

Most of these photos were always shown in a black and white format and very rarely used colour, this gave the photo a very old feel effect instead of a mordern effect as the colour images would give. 

Application 

Photo Journalism originates from the 1930's. A photographer named Henri Cartier - Bresson was the reason that this type of photography excists today. This was possible by the 'decisive moment'. The decisive moment is when a picture is captured at the exact moment that gives that picture meaning. In other words at the exact same time that something happens that will mean something to other people, so if the image was captured one second earlier or one second later then the meaning of the whole photogragh would be different. Cartier - Bresson would wait around for these types of images. He would just sit in one place and wait for the oppurtune moment to come. He always believed that life would happen/come in to the most quiet places, and when it did he would be ready to take the photo, because of this he was considered to be a 'stalker'. This type of photography was possible with the Leica camera.

The first Leica Camera (1925)

                                    

This camera was small. quiet and compact which meant it was easier to use and would be quicker to capture an image. Cartier - Bresson was one of the first people to have one of these cameras. The Lecia camera was made in 1925, and was a big step up from the big camera that took a while to process images. Cartier - Bresson considered himself to be a surrealist. This is the photo that started off the 'decisive moment' that we still use in photography today.

The photograph that started the 'decisive moment'

Context

The images war photographs. They show the war in a up close and personal way. Robert Capa was the most talented war photographer of the second world war. Capa captured the ultimate decisive moment in 1936 when he captured the death of a spanish soilder in the spanish civil war. An advantage to what Capa was doing was that he good pick and choose what wars etc that he could take part of and be the photographer for. When he wasn't out taking pictures of the war he worked for a magazine called Life magazine. While here he was the first ever photographer to be sent out into a war, this was to Ohama beach and he managed to capture 4 rolls of film. Some of these images were to be used in his magazine to give information to the general public, but when his rolls were sent back to the studio to be developed, they were accidently burned and destroyed. This left Capa with 11 frames, and these soon became the most famous war photos of our time. 

This is one of the few pictures that were recovered from the damaged film

At the same time as Capa there was another photographer 'Tony Vaccaro' who also took pride in war photography, but Vaccaro was a soilder photographer so didn't have the luxury of choice when it came to choosing what wars to photograph. He wasn't considered to be a good photographer so not many people paid attention to any of his work. Because Vaccaro was having to work out in the field he didn't have the proper equipment to develop his photograghs so created his own processing equipment outside in a feild. Using trees and buckets. Vaccaro took some amazing photos of the war he was in but all these 'went missing' during the night while he was sleeping, this was because the images contained in the photographs the government believed the normal public would not be ready for.

Capa's life was short lived as he went into war but while there stepped on a land mine. He was still alive but lost a leg and had a big wound in his chest, he was taken to hospital and pronounced dead. He died with his camera in his hand. Vaccaro is still alive today.

Techniques

There are many different techniques involved in taking these types of pictures, but the one's used in the type of photography would be the use of films. Throughout history the way a camera takes and develops pictures has changed. Starting off with cameras such as the Leica camera onto todays mordern digital ones. Older cameras would use slides which with some would take a long time to change over and you could only take a certain amount of pictures for each slide, whereas todays camera you can get a small memory stick that can hold thousands. With the old style of camera when taking photojournalism style photos it would mean that you would have less time to be able to capture moments so that when a war was happening you would miss a lot of it because of having to change the slide over. This meant that a lot of important (could of been) photographs were miss out on.