Photojournalism's New Frontier
News Photographer, January 2010.
When in-house web developer Alan Taylor started The Big Picture blog at Boston.com in June of 2009, he thought making photos 990 pixels wide (10.5 inches, or about the size of this magazine lengthwise) "hit a sweet spot. "
"It's not so large that it's a wallpaper, but not so small that it's frustrating," he said. Viewers- and by the end of 2009 there were almost a half a million every month- seemed to like searching each individual face in a Chinese military drill on their computer screen, or seeing every snowflake falling on a bighorn sheep at Glacier National Park.
Well… not all viewers. Toronto iPhone programmer Taylan Pince "liked the Big Picture blog, but the way I read and I get my content changed after I got my iPhone," he said. So he decided to create an iPhone application that resized those big pictures for the iPhone's 3.5-inch screen.
"When you think about it, it's ironic," Pince said, "but the iPhone screen is so high resolution, I don't think you lose very much." His app allows you to zoom in on the pictures to see details.
Taylor and Pince may prefer opposite ends of the size spectrum, but both speak to a flowering interest in photojournalism online and on portable mobile devices. Whether the hardware is a mobile phone, a reader tablet, or a plain old computer screen, these technologies let photojournalists share their work and grow their audiences in ways and in quantities unheard of 15 years ago.
In early December 2009, Time Inc. released a conceptual video of Sports Illustrated as a dynamic magazine application on a 10-inch, touch-screen tablet reader. Never mind that the tablet device itself doesn't yet exist commercially, or that Time Inc. doesn't plan on manufacturing the hardware– instead, Time released the demo in the pursuit of having content ready to sell on whatever tablet platforms become available. Long-discussed but unconfirmed rumors peg the release of an Apple tablet to the first half of 2010.
Josh Quittner, editor at large at Time Magazine, was part of the group that designed the conceptual magazine experience, calling it a "Manhattan project."
For the tablets, "photography is enormously important. When we started to look at this stuff we were very conscious of making sure the photographic experience was part of the show," said Quittner.
Watching the online demonstration, visuals abound. Photos morph into video and become still again, the SI Leading Off photos pop as vividly as they would in The Big Picture, and single photos are actually part of slideable slideshows. This tablet would be an undeniable visual improvement over the currently available black-and-white screen Kindle.
"When you see photos that are full-screen on a 10-inch screen, they're just gorgeous. They're so beautiful, you think you can eat them," said Quittner.
To be sure, Quittner and Time aren't just aesthetes. "Maybe if we began to think about magazines as fluid, multi-dimensional applications, people would possibly be willing to pay us [for content]," Quittner said. What photojournalist wouldn't be happy right now with a new revenue stream and more extensive photoplay?
If tablet photojournalism belongs to the near future, companies are paying attention to the moneymaking potential of mobile and web images now. In August, Getty Images began selling 170 pixel and 280 pixel stock and creative images, sizes designed for web and mobile buyers. Though editorial images aren't available in those mobile sizes, an editorial 413-pixel-wide web format is for sale.
Molly McWhinnie, the manager of Public Relations at Getty Images, said the company was continually "doing more customer research to develop new products" in the digital realm.
Editors of other successful photojournalism websites on the web see mobile applications as their manifest destiny.
Since late 2005, Zena Koo of Magnum Photos has brainstormed and edited about 1,400 slideshows for the Today's Photos feature on Slate.com. With slideshows on topics from bored couples to scooters to climate change, Koo and Magnum have built an audience that has grown to average around 350,000 unique visitors per month, she said. Koo and her colleagues want to make the page more mobile friendly, and have discussed an iPhone app.
That web audience, said Koo, has worked to develop a new audience for Magnum's work, and in the process has reintroduced Cartier-Bresson's agency as "a living organization."
Many of the photos culled from the archive have never been published.
"A lot of the photographers really like it," Koo said.
Other news organizations, like the AP and Reuters, have jumped into mobile displays. Both have free iPhone apps that feature daily photojournalism. (The AP even sells their Style Book as an iPhone app.)
And there's plenty of frontier left, considering that the iTunes App Store is less than two years old.
These technologies nurture a new audience for photojournalists. Before The Big Picture, Taylan Pince said he had never paid attention to news photography. Now he may check high-quality photojournalism while in line at the coffee shop.
And he's not alone. When a gallery of President Obama's inauguration went up in January 2009, around 5,000,000 unique visitors viewed the pictures, Taylor said. That's five times the daily circulation of the print New York Times, and approaching the circulation of Life Magazine at its mid-century peak.
Touch screen tablets, said Josh Quittner, "should make people fall in love with photography all over again, which is good for your membership [the NPPA]." Online and on mobile phones, that love affair has already begun.