“Collecting water. Amravati District, India 2010,” by Michael F McElroy. Via Verve Photo.
We’ve posted previously on work we found via Verve Photo. It’s a great blog, and anyone who enjoys documentary photography should certainly be following it.
Every now and again, though, they post what strikes me as a straight-up bad photograph, which is the case here. What purpose does this awkward composition serve? Why the heavy-handed use of what is presumably either a lensbaby or digital emulation of a lensbaby? In fact, why place the woman in the foreground out of focus at all?
Based on the commentary McElroy provided to Verve, I don’t see how these choices serve the story. Indeed, quite the contrary. Consider this:
For the women in India’s rural area’s getting a bucket of drinking water is a daily struggle in which most cases women walk an average of 2.5 kms to reach a source of water that is often contaminated with high levels of fluoride or is to saline to drink.
Nothing about the photograph conveys a sense of distance. Because of the perspective, camera position, and framing, the women seem to be coming from nowhere and going to nowhere — a problem that is magnified by the way in which the defocused areas separate them from their context.
Of course, it’s quite likely that McElroy has other photographs which establish the situation more clearly, and it’s also possible that he had good reasons for approaching this photograph in the way he did — but certainly, the combination of this photograph with this narrative does not work.
Of course, we are talking about photojournalism, and in that case, there is an extent to which one can say, “It does not matter if the photograph is good, so long as it is a photograph of something which is sufficiently newsworthy.”
I think that’s a reasonable stance to take, and I think it excuses a wide range of photographic sins, but it doesn’t cover a case where the photographer appears to going out of his way to eschew simple reportage in favor of what can only be described as an “artistic” or “creative” approach.
I took a look at McElroy’s site, and it’s something of a mixed bag. There are a handful of photographs with the same sort of lensbaby effects, which mostly strike me as annoying. The portraits strike me as being neither technically very impressive nor very interesting as portraits. But probably half or two thirds are simply straight documentary photographs, and some of those are quite good.
I wonder whether photographs like this one have been added to McElroy’s portfolio because a market exists now specifically for this kind of nonsense, even within a journalistic context. I sure hope not, but it’s entirely possible that that’s the case.
