Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center | Who’s going to take tomorrow’s news photos? | Fabio Bucciarelli
01/06/2015
Is there any future for photojournalism as it is known today? Will photojournalism – as it is known today – survive the wave of radical changes of the last decade? And if it will not, how shall we get the immense pictorial information which is conveyed to us by news photos today? There will be a public discussion at the Capa Center’s theatre hall on these issues on 6 June at 7 pm. The program is in English and there is no admission fee.
There are very few people who could challenge the statement that photojournalism is going through radical changes and it is facing some more to come. Many say the profession is actually hit by a crisis.
It can be said that the reason for this is that the printed press and the picture magazines in particular are quickly losing ground, most of them practically slowly disappear. Moreover, the digital age, particularly the smart phones with constantly improved bulit-in cameras are causing a total liberalization in photography.
However, the opinions of professionals largely differ about the future. Some of them envisage that this profession, as it is known today, will completely disappear in the future, but some other opinions are only forecasting changes in financing – involving quite a few serious challanges to the whole profession. How and where will we get the immense pictorial information which is conveyed to us by news photos today?
This issue will be discussed at the event of the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center:
• on the one hand with the representatives of a fresh and independent initiative which has ritually broken away from earlier financing and editing traditions,
• on the other hand with an expert who has been working for decades as a curator and editor in the field of documentary photography and also manages an international photo agency
• and thirdly with a Hungarian photographer, who had a varied career as a photojournalist before becoming a contemporary artist.
Italian and Spanish photojournalists Fabio Bucciarelli and Manu Brabo responded to the changes of their profession by founding Me-Mo Magazine early this year with community financing. The magazine appearing as an iPad application is edited by Maral Degathi together with the readers and is based on top-quality multimedia content, as well as infographics and primarily on photo reports, of course. All five members of the magazine’s photographer team worked for global news agencies earlier such as AFP, EPA or AP and with an ambivalent experience of the market they started something completely new.
Robert Pledge is the editorial director of international news agency Contact Press Images, which represents world-famous photographers, such as Annie Leibovitz, Don McCullin, John G. Morris or Sebastião Salgado. We can justly say that Pledge is an expert who knows all the ins and outs of his profession. He has already moved away from the model of publishing news photos primarily in the press decades ago to showing documentary photography successfully in books, exhibitions, private and public collections.
At the beginning of his career, Rudolf Balogh Prize-winning photographer Gyula Sopronyi was working in the Hungarian press, mostly for the daily Népszabadság. Then he became a freelancer and his photos have been published since 2008 in The New York Times or in COLORS Magazin, but he was also working for National Geographic Hungary and the UNHCR. He recently began – leaving photojournalism slowly behind him – to take series of photographs inspired by contemporary art, which is displayed at his first solo exhibition in Hungary, at the Project Room of the Capa Center from April 28 to May 23, 2015.
The date of the discussion: Saturday, June 6, 2015, 7pm
The place of the discussion: the theatre hall of the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Center (1065 Budapest, Nagymez? u. 8.)
The debate will be held in English and there is no admission fee.
capacenter.hu/en/esemenyek/whos-going-to-take-tomorrows-news-photos/