Is news photography also documentary photography? Yes. News photography documents the immediate news situation. Shortly thereafter it is history. That’s a rather simplistic timeline, but for the most part it holds. Today’s news photo from the city council meeting is tomorrow’s document of that occurrence. But it is also a document of how people and places looked, although in news that is usually not an intention.
In a sense (that is debatable and discussable), all news photography is documentary photography, but not all documentary photography is news photography.
This is a photograph I made in the summer of 1982 while working in Washington, D.C. as a photojournalist. I was covering the 10th anniversary of the Watergate break-in with a reporter from the Boston Globe. The event was certainly news. This photo of George McGovern giving remarks at one of the parties in unremarkable. It’s the kind of thing you get covering this kind of event in Washington D.C. Published and quickly forgotten. But it remains a document of the event and who was there and what they looked like. This is an example of a humdrum news photo becoming, I think, a more interesting record of the event and a famous politician who spoke that night.
One of the big things to do during Christmas in the Aveiro region of Portugal is to visit the town of Águeda where they put on a big show of lights and entertainment. The city attracts thousands of people daily throughout December. For me, this was a great opportunity to do a little street photography (a form of documentary as well as art). And here is a document of a moment during December of 2023. The happy moment of the young couple making a selfie caught my eye because it seemed a fitting illustration of what Águeda offers its Christmas visitors. This image is not particularly newsworthy.
Capturing the news requires an understanding of the immediate journalistic purpose of covering a news event (or just about anything else that catches the journalistic gaze). But documentary photography is about understanding the long-term value of capturing an image. What is interesting to the documentary gaze may seem dull to the journalistic gaze.
Remember how I started this series? Capturing infrastructure 🙂