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Photo

These and others of Arthur Fellig’s photographs of New York City in the 1930s and ’40

After hearing the report over his police radio, Weegee would race to the scene of the crime and get to work. But his work didn’t involve arresting suspects or holding gangsters at gunpoint. He would go solely to capture the image on film, to be put in print for the next day’s newspapers.

“The images attest to the drive and obsession of this one person. Weegee was almost like a hunter in a way,” said UCLA art Professor Arthur Ou, who teaches beginning photography. “There was something more than giving these pictures to newspapers, than just the journalistic sense of making images. There was some artistic intent.”

The Getty Museum has put together a collection of over 60 of the iconic images from ’30s and ’40s newspapers taken by Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, and is pairing this exhibit with another group of photos called “Pictures for the Press,” which features some of the biggest news-making events of the 20th century, like the atomic bomb dropped over Nagasaki or the D-Day invasion of Omaha Beach, as documented by photojournalists in newspapers or magazines of the day.

The exhibition of these collections inevitably provokes the question of whether photojournalism constitutes art. These images were taken for profit, in documentation of a specific event.

Yet the Getty Museum, known primarily for its collection of classical art, has chosen to display them. (The exhibition’s curator, Judith Keller, was out of town for personal reasons and unavailable for additional comment).

How do you draw the line between where art ends and business begins? It isn’t difficult to recognize that the celebrity photos gracing the pages of Us Weekly will likely never resurface as an artistic manifesto. However, in the case of Weegee and others, the process of classifying images becomes far more complicated.

“There is a fine line,” said Alex Klein, an graduate student studying photography. “Weegee is a good example of that because I really don’t think of him as just a photojournalist. Sometimes the way a photographer gets close to his subjects is through photojournalism because he couldn’t have gotten as close as he did to things he wanted to photograph if he hadn’t been hired by newspapers to do it.”

The issue becomes more complex in comparing photojournalism to its artistic counterpart, documentary photography.

“Photojournalism comes from the day – ‘jour.’ Its root word means ‘of the day,’” said art Professor James Welling at a recent Hammer Museum panel discussing the evolution of photography as a fine art form. “Art photographers may have a longer day, or scope of vision, than a photojournalist’s day.”

Photographers publishing for a newspaper or magazine often try to boil down an entire story to a single framed image. The image itself becomes distorted and manipulated when viewed alongside its text or explained by a written caption.

“A lot of times with photographic images, what is outside of the picture is equally as important as what’s inside,” Ou said. “In that sense, photojournalistic images, taken out of the context of newspapers or magazines, could have their meaning changed very easily.”

The French photographer Henri Cartier Bresson has often been recognized as the father of the documentary mode of photography. Bresson first addressed the idea of “finding the decisive moment” in a day and capturing it in a photograph, which has since been a concept embraced by photojournalists.

Documentary photography and photojournalism share many similarities. Their distinctions come down to differences in intent and time.

“I think for me the line is more when you’re covering an event specifically for publication and not looking to leave your artistic stamp on the image, versus exploring it and documenting something,” Klein said. “It’s like making a picture versus making a story.”

“Photojournalistic images are dependent on time, much more so than documentary images,” Ou said. “They’re reports or events of that particular day.”

Just as the meaning of a photo often depends on the context in which it is being viewed, the development or classification of photojournalism must also be taken in context. Photography has really only been considered by the collectors market as another expression of fine art in the last couple of decades.

Before that, renowned photographers such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange were merely hired by the government’s Work Projects Administration during the Depression of the 1930s to document the plight of dying and starving people in the heartland of America. Since then, their images have become iconic.

“In the early days of photography, there was no fine art photography, so they shot photographs that we might consider to be very artistic, but there was no concept of it as artistic photography,” Klein said.

Because photography was not always valued as highly as drawing or painting, photographers often had to take on projects for profit so that they could continue on with their livelihood. For example, Diane Arbus, a documentary photographer of the 1960s, was specifically hired by publications to leave her unique artistic stamp on the image needed for publication.

Similarly, photographers may pursue documentary projects that are then partially reproduced as photo essays in a journalistic publication. Although the presentation has changed, the intent has not. Thus photojournalism at times can come down to a matter of perception.

“The passage of time and reproduction in art publications has sort of changed the meaning of these images,” Ou said.

Perhaps photography’s most unique quality as an art medium lies in its dependence on technology. As technology evolves, photography does also.

What could be seen as photojournalism today could maintain a lasting impact in the future, as Weegee’s arresting images have done.

“I’m not so sure I could draw a line between what’s art and what isn’t,” said professional photographer Stephen Shore. “If you feel it’s iconic, then it’s probably art.”