Retrospective
Michel Lipchitz
Associated Press
To write? - Yes, I would have liked to write about all the things I experienced during the major events that have affected our planet. Unable to put pen to paper, I set to work with my different lenses. I felt that, in a way, photography and writing complement each other.
When you have produced a photograph that does not need a caption, that shows and testifies to a moment, an activity, a place in all its intensity, then you have succeeded.
The same three tools are needed simultaneously to understand both words and pictures - the eye, the mind, and sensitivity. Together, text and photograph form a whole, a force that nothing can ever seperate.
Preview
This is why our presence during news events, which helps to protect freedom, remains essential. Photo-reportage continues to occupy a place of its own alongside television which is a separate but complementary medium. Some said television was the end of photojournalism! And what about newspapers, then?
It is the responsibility of chief editors to give their readers more attractive newspapers through their choice of articles and the photographs that go with them ("Le Monde" supplements its columns with photographs). This is evident from the fact that in the 21st century photograghs are being collected, are being exhibited and are even becoming museum pieces.
Writers like Kessel, Hemingway, Bodard and many others were photojournalists before the term existed, going out into the real world looking for their subjects.
"Documentary photography", wrote Pierre Mac Orlan, "is literary without knowing it".
Paul Valéry, for his part, emphasized, "photography takes from us the desire to describe what can be read in itself". This is what the writer and photographer Emile Zola, who is considered to be the photogragher of the Second Empire, passionately felt.
