Still Photography On Television?

 

WASHINGTON, DC (April 27, 2009) – There's been an unusual spate of still photojournalism – and the photographers behind the pictures – being featured on television in the past few days, and most of the the photographs are coming out of the same location: the White House.

And while some of the pictures are about the presidency, a few of them are clearly for the birds.

This round of still pictures on TV started on Thursday with Time photographer Callie Shell being featured on NBC's Today Show with her photographs of President Barack Obama as they were featured in a Time magazine layout about the president's first 100 days in office. Host Meredith Vieira interviewed Shell as the photojournalist loosely narrated and commented on a slideshow of a selection of her images, and Shell's gallery in Time is online here.

Then on Friday on NBC Nightly News, Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Ron Edmonds was put in the newscast's closing spotlight by anchor Brian Williams when the veteran journalist recognized Edmonds for his dogged legwork to track down a frenzied Robin that was spotted coming and going from the bushes and trees around the West Wing. Edmonds watched and waited and found the reason for the bird's strange behavior: a nest filled with half a dozen small blue eggs, which he documented as they hatched and the birds became the newest residents at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

And on Sunday, official White House photographer and NPPA member Pete Souza appeared on CNN's "State Of The Union" with correspondent John King and a slideshow of Souza's Obama photographs from deep inside the administration's first 100 days.

"I try to photograph everything, every meeting the president does," Souza told King. "I look at my job as a visual historian. The most important thing is to create a good visual archive for history so that 50 or 100 years from now, people can go back and look at these pictures."

Souza talked about one of his favorite behind-the-scenes photographs so far, a picture of Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton having a conversation aboard Air Force One enroute to the recent European economic summit. The two politicians, once bitter rivals during the Democratic presidential campaign, in Souza's photograph now look like long-time friends, laughing and smiling in relaxed conversation.

While newspapers and magazines have suffered greatly recently at the hands of the economy, declining advertising, and declining print readership, with plenty of finger pointing toward television and the Internet as the culprits, these three rather small but high-profile examples of the public's interest in still photographs should serve editors as a strong reminder of the power these images still carry, and the clear appetite readers have for them when they're properly presented.

 

 

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