Rochester Photojournalism Conference 1953

ROCHESTER PHOTOJOURNALISM CONFERENCE 1953

vincent s. Jones

Vincent S. Jones is Director, News and Editorial Office of the Gannett Newspapers, which position he has held since 1950. He is an amateur photographer and lecturer at photo short courses to bring the editor's point of view to photographers. He was one of the editors of the official Digest of this conference recently published by the National Press Photographers Association.

When editors, photographers, and production men sat down together for the better part of a week at George Eastman House in Rochester last September to talk about news pictures they made history—and some progress.

It was the first time that people from all departments concerned with taking, editing and printing news pictures, about 200 of them, had met and sought common ground. They found that our problems were even tougher than they had supposed; that it would take more than brave words about brains vs. machines and Buck Rogers talk about electronics to solve them.

An appalling series of obstacles is strewn along the path between a good picture idea and a good newspaper printing job. First come bad assignments, lazy photographers, poorly qualified picture editors, limited space and, above all, the relentless pressure of deadlines. They are familiar headaches. They are also just about the only things within our power to remedy.

Beyond that lies a vast jungle of compromises—in film, engraving, in stereo and press equipment, in inadequate inks, and paper that is downright bad. Few of these problems can even be measured, let alone controlled.

Costs, haste, and the millstone of existing equipment make it unlikely that much will be done about reproduction—barring sensational progress in the offset field. Most of the conferees were shocked to find out how little research work was being done in the newspaper field; nor was much promise held out that anything would be done. This was in vivid contrast to television, whose engineers took something shaky and made it work.

The record of the conference lies in a thick bundle of manuscripts, hundreds of slides, and along 15,000 feet of tape. An official digest and a complete photo report was published in May of this year. Here are some snapshots from a crowded week.

BROAD CONCEPTS From top editors came warnings that newspaper executives are too engrossed in production, labor and distribution problems, with little energy left over for investigative reporting and no interest in new ideas. Poorer results sometimes come from improved processes and we wind up doing an assembly job instead of a creative one.

Imperceptably magazines have begun to take over the job of printing information, once exclusively our field.

The most provocative thinking was contributed by Wilson Hicks, now a consultant, who was in on the beginnings of both Associated Press Wirephoto.and LIFE. Picture taking, he pointed out, once was a selective art, but man’s desire to keep the machines busy is giving us a flood of images. He questioned whether people might not be coming less picture minded, because we only half see what is around us anyhow. So many photographers and editors think alike that we have created a “ghost world” and are peopling it and setting it with phony images. Picture editors work for a standard image and the results are like baby talk. Meanwhile, our audience is improving and we must catch up. He challenged the wordless picture as telling the general public only what is completely familiar; paid his respects to retouchers (“frustrated artists”), pleaded for captions that would still make sense six months later.

His approach to TV was stimulating: “Still picture journalism should hit spot news harder than ever.” He was quick to spot the insultingly macabre overtones in a TV claim to “inherit” from journalism. TV, he argued, is not one of the media; it merely serves to get a movie from here to there. And TV is suffering from a hangover of radio word men. It needs ideas instead of personalities. Public attention will be won, in the long run, by the photographer with the best selective and interpretative capacity.

From this writer came a challenge to the well-established “variety show” picture page (10 pictures, 10 subjects). So deeply-rooted is the routine concept, however, that an all-out assault on it as wasteful and unsound either as art or journalism drew choloric defense. A lively debate satisfied us that very few editors or photographers ever knew why this type of page happened, or had thought about it.

COLOR Nearly a third of the discussion revolved about color and how to use it. Although no really new processes have come along, various refinements and shortcuts and, above all, the fanatical zeal of some pioneers have cut the time elements down from days to hours.

Ed Thompson, managing editor, who flies LIFE by the seat of his pants, gave the “aint’s” of color—on speed, accuracy, cheapness and warned that if you tried hard enough, a color picture could be just as dull as B. & W. He also noted the preoccupation of advertisers with the red scale (notable exception: chlorophyll), LIFE’S approach to the fantastically complex and expensive problem of color is to use it only when it provides impact and makes sense, LIFE actually prefers a black and white cover, because it stands out among its competitors on a news stand.

Bob Dumke, the MILWAUKEE JOURNAL’S rainbow specialist, thinks that one of the great byproducts is that the task of color printing unites every department of the newspaper as nothing else. Also that a newspaper should be willing to spend money (it takes plenty) to prove that it can do the job before trying to sell it to advertisers.

Spot color is not entirely practical at the moment, although heroic exertions produced great results on the election, the inauguration, and the coronation. The current goal is 21/2 to 3 hours. Color also holds some promise as the best way to get a “new angle” on the second cycle. The old prejudice against 35mm. transparancies is fading, because they can be converted and often this is the only type of camera which can cover certain events.

EQUIPMENT There is little new in this field, and TV continues to pull away from us in its ability to see into dark corners and follow action. The working photographers want faster film (especially color), reliable sequence cameras, and the adaption of the Polaroid process to all kinds of cameras. They are keenly interested in Graflex’s brave pitch at producing the perfect all-around camera, but there is no word as when the $1,200 beauty (it uses 70mm. film) would be out of the Army’s clutches. Meanwhile, most of the Doubting Thomases have learned what the miniature cameras can do for them.

After just about everybody had pronounced the sequence camera problem insolvable, up stepped an apple-cheeked Virginian who took the wraps off a device of such surpassing simplicity that everyone wondered why some Henry Ford hadn’t thought of it years ago. Charles Hulcher got around the problem of pulsation and vibration by remembering the wheel and making everything revolve. The whole thing is rugged, simple, light (35 lbs.), and darned expensive—$3,500. That is because it was made for the government to film rockets and missiles. A few orders would get this contraption out of the custom-built class and might open up a brand new field of high-speed, large-frame sequence photography.

It might spark another great decade like the 1930’s, which brought flash and floodlights, the 35mm. camera, color film, fast B&W film, the picture magazines, and a revolution in the things that could be photographed with good equipment. Don Mohler, GE’s able ambassador, thinks we are past the period of abuse (the flash on the camera, once the badge of the professional, now marks the amateur). The trends today are towards miniaturizing and simplicity, of doing things unobtrusively, simply and at lower cost. Greatest equipment need of the moment is for sequence flash.

RESEARCH apparently is something for other people. The average American industry puts 3 per cent of its gross income into research, but the American Newspaper Publishers Association’s 25-man staff and $225,000 budget amounts to about .001 per cent of newspaper gross. BOMBSHELL OF THE SESSION was Wilson Hicks’ sharp comment that it still was the editor’s duty to select the picture that told the story and then expect the production department to do the rest of the job.

A TIP: Watch Xerography.

A COUPLE OF SALVAGE PROJECTS The speakers assigned to discuss Society and Sports picture coverage very properly objected to this title, but everyone knew what was meant.

Cafe Society may have ruined Society (capital S) but we still serve snobbery (whose daughter gets the three-column cut, or the single— or none? ). Garrett Byrnes, Providence production editor, thinks society and women’s pages would be better if top editors paid more attention to them. Along with the transition from “Society” to “women,” most newspapers (but not all of them) have broken away from the cookie-cutter school of layout in which the art work engulfs the photography.

Des Moines has not given up on sports art. It takes 30 staffers, airplanes whose schedules are adjusted to the day’s winds, and a skillfully staggered processing line to cover football for the 10-page Sunday sports section. The coverage, with nearly half the space covered with sequences and diagram shots, has been polished for twenty years, but the project never quite clicked until the REGISTER AND TRIBUNE learned to use its personnel as “identifiers.” They spot the key plays, take notes, write cut lines.

Only a big newspaper could do it this way. But any newspaper could apply the lessons of planning, imagination, teamwork on any scale from one diagram picture up.

And almost any newspaper could try a picture page like the one Dante Tranquille produces for Utica’s SUNDAY OBSERVER-DISPATCH. His themes are homely but the photography is excellent, the layouts so simple that any printer can put the page together without supervision. Their impact has had much to do with the Sunday edition’s growth. WHAT IS A PERFECT PICTURE EDITOR? Wilson Hicks mixed up this prescription:

• He should be a good newsman. His first concern is consummation— not as art or technique. Does the picture say what the newspaper wants it to say? He should know people.

• He should not be a photographer. Taking and editing pictures are two different things. Both involve judgment. Picture-taking is emotional (and intellectual), but judging pictures is an intellectual exercise. A good photographer gets wrapped up in his work. The editor looks only at the essentials.

• He should be a good coordinator and have ideas.

• He should know technical matters, but not so much that he can’t leave something to the photographer’s initiative.

• He should be a college graduate with wide ideas.

• He should have “Qualification X”—an understanding of creative aims and ambitions; willing to discuss ideas.

To which should be added two quotes:

• Ed Thompson (LIFE) : I’m not sure I want editors to be photographers. It makes them too sympathetic.

• Don Mohler (General Electric) : When editors get interested in taking pictures it removes the photographer’s last alibi.

FACULTY The conference drew heavily upon the National Press Photographers Association, whose Educational and Technical Committee has been the backbone of every successful photo short course in recent years. The George Eastman House, co-sponsor, contributed its fine theatre, its opulent quarters, its unrivaled collections of pictures and photo equipment, and the counsel of Curator Beaumont Newhall, No. 1 historian of photography and photographers.

Definitely the hit of the show and its “oracle” was Wilson Hicks, who played a key role in the early days of Wirephoto and LIFE, is now a consultant—sage, mellow, and accessible. He put together in three speeches and innumerable conversations much of the basic words-andpictures philosophy which the conference sought to translate into everyday life.