The hierarchy of newspaper photographs
Scene Through the Lens with photographer Tom Gralish.
My assignment that day was pretty typical for a newspaper photographer: show the reader what the person a reporter is profiling looks like. And maybe what they do and where they do it.
Having accomplished that task, I headed out looking for something else to photograph in the snow, and ended up at a pedestrian passage way.
As I made a picture of a person silhouetted in the corrugated metal culvert, the first thing I thought of was an old friend and photo editor Joe Elbert who famously said there are four categories in the “hierarchy” of newspaper photographs, lowest to highest: informational, graphic, emotional, and intimate.
In just a few hours I had knocked out his “lower” two types.
I made a few pictures that report “just the facts” without much flavor or fanfare. Then I found a visually appealing scene and waited until I could turn it into a well composed, interesting image. Graphic, even.
I thought of Joe again as we learned on Wednesday that the Washington Post laid off a third of its journalists, including all of the staff photographers and half the photo editors.
Joe was the photo editor at the Post from 1988 through 2007. Under his direction the paper won four Pulitzer Prizes, and many other awards, all for work that epitomizes that highest category of intimate photographs.
It’s easy to feel nostalgic for those “glory days,” but I mourn that almost an entire section of the newspaper is now gone.
Post photographers were still creating those most intimate images of Joe’s hierarchy. They were still making the reader feel something that allows us to connect with lives beyond our own, to empathize, and to care.
Since 1998 a black-and-white photo has appeared every Monday in staff photographer Tom Gralish’s “Scene Through the Lens” photo column in the print editions of The Inquirer’s local news section. Here are the most recent, in color: