Lecture 5: Picture Stories

William Klein's 1955 "Gun Play"

The ‘Picture Stories’ lecture was the third part of the text, sound and image focus of the last three weeks. Although it may not seem like it picture stories are everywhere they really are. Not only in the obvious things such as newspapers, magazines, television and movies, but in less obvious places such as social media and networking sites like Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr and memes.  The most surprising thing Bruce mentioned where picture stories are located for me was graffiti. I would have never considered graffiti as a picture story, as their technique is not as straightforward as a picture or movie, but in the case of artists such as Banksy the meaning is conveyed just as simply.

The first part of the lecture focused on the history of picture stories, such as French cave paintings from 15000-10000 BC, Aboriginal cave drawings, holy books and stained glass windows. From this we examined the history of news in regards to pictures. Amongst the examples mentioned was the move from line illustrations in newspapers to the first images relating to a news story, Henry J. Newton’s “Shanty Town”, to the first colour image printed in a newspaper in 1936 and ending with the first photo posted on the internet in 1990. My favourite part of the first half of the lecture was the facts presented at the end chronicling how many photos are uploaded to Instagram a second, 60, the total number of photos on Facebook, approximately 190 billion, and how many photos are uploaded to Flickr daily, 4.5 million. We then explored the way photo journalism is changing due to technology, such as being able to capture an image and immediately send it to a newspaper or editor, the ease with which photographs can be manipulated and is this a good or a bad thing and how through digital newspapers a photo journalist is able to create a gallery of images taken at an event compared to only one or two that would be published in a newspaper.

From this we looked at cinematography, beginning in France in 1895, to Australia’s federation film in 1901, and Sergi Eisenstein, the father of montage. This was then narrowed down in relation to news, how news was first shown in cinemas, various propaganda films, most memorable I would claim are Hitler’s, how television news was first read straight to the camera without any footage of the event, like a radio but with pictures, occasionally even being read from a newspaper. All this has evolved into what we have now, 24/7 news, amateur and eyewitness images and film, which particularly took off after the 2005 London bombings, and the new career of a VJ, a video journalist, one person who films and reports, like a one maned reported crew.