Going Beyond Illustration

Photojournalists tend to stay aloof from talk about camera aesthetics. Something about dodging gunfire in Beirut seems to discourage ruminations on style -- understandably enough. More to the point, no one who catalogs bloodshed and catastrophe wants to be thought of as one more vendor to the senses. Some news photographers spend half their lives chasing war, so who can blame them if, when they hear the word art, they make for the door?

Yet even with "soft" news pictures, the benign shots of a street festival or a spelling bee, to look for converging lines or the distribution of shadows seems to miss the point, as though dwelling on style means slighting the substance. Worse, it suggests that the work was preconceived in a way that no reporting is supposed to be. The examples of artist-reporters like W. Eugene Smith and Henri Cartier-Bresson prove otherwise, but the assumption survives that artists have visions, journalists have assignments. They both may think to themselves, "I am a camera," but each means something different.

So what does it mean today to call photojournalism an art? An iconoclastic exhibition now touring the country composes its answer out of 120 prints by twelve photographers, all of them affiliated with photo agencies that distribute their work to magazines and newspapers. "On the Line: The New Color Photojournalism" originated earlier this year at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. This week it will complete a stop at the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Me. From there it will travel over the next two years to Chapel Hill, N.C., Lawrence, Kans., Austin, Pittsburgh, Aspen, Colo., and Toledo. Adam D. Weinberg, who organized the exhibit, describes these pictures as "on the line" between art and journalism. He tends to draw the line at the point where both art and reporting reject the cleanly composed image that makes a plain statement. These pictures make statements too, but in a more offhand language.

At a religious feast in Guatemala, a man playing the role of Judas is "hanged." Most photographers would show his whole figure. Gilles Peress gives us just his feet, dangling from the top of the frame, an acknowledgment that this bit of village pageantry has its share of the airborne sublime. A statue is carried through the streets in a Holy Week procession. Peress crops out the bearers, the better to invest the figure with an unearthly life of its own. His colors are deeply saturated reds and purples that push his shots into the realm of theatrical fantasy. These are not just pictures of a festival but equivalents of the festival spirit: flushed, headlong and maybe a bit tipsy.