While I was browsing the internet this week I found something that I really wanted to share. It’s a collection of triptych images of soldier before, during, and after their terms of deployment in Afghanistan. This project is the product of 8 months of work done by photographer Lalage Snow who is currently based in Kabul, Afghanistan. As I looked at the series as a whole, I realized I was torn between viewing this as art and viewing this as photojournalism. I think that I’ve come to the conclusion that both artistic and photojournalistic efforts were made by Snow in order to fully accomplish the intention of the project.
From an artistic perspective, Snow’s decision to present these images to the viewer in the form of a triptych shows that Snow wants all of these images to be compared in a certain way. It’s not about comparing one subject in one image to a different subject in another image. It’s about comparing the subject, as it appears in multiple images, to itself. The triptych communicates a sense of immediacy in the comparison and successfully represents the progression of time in a visual manner.
From a photojournalistic point of view, Snow chose to represent all of the subjects in the same monochromatic way in order to make the viewer pay attention to the way that the subject changed and not to the editing choices. On that note, I do think that Snow is aware that there is a direct correlation between the amount of editing an image appears to undergo and the degree to which the viewer considers and image to be on of “truth”. By making no particularly overt editing choices, the viewer is able to understand the series of images as one that serves the purpose of documenting contrast and change. The context of the images, the on-going war in Afghanistan, is also one that is probably more heavily associate with photojournalism that the visual arts per say simply because the majority of the images we, the general public, see that surface from this same context are those seen within a journalistic, informative frame.
As I realized the different artistic and photojournalistic elements of this project I started to move towards a new school of thought: Artists and photojournalists need to understand the formal choices of both genres in order to successfully communicate their intentions in a visual way.
Kodachrome 