The Art of Photojournalism

Paolo Pellegrin is one of the world's foremost photojournalists. In recent years he has won a host of major awards, including the W Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography (2006), the Overseas Press Club's Robert Capa Gold Medal Award (2007) and the World Press Photo First Prize (twice, in 2006 and 2007). His most recent publication, As I Was Dying, has continued the trend by winning both the Leica European Publishers Award (2007) and the Deutsche Fotobuchpreis (2008). In many respects Pellegrin's work might be said to conform to the expectations of conventional photojournalism. The photographs in his new title are culled from assignments undertaken in the trouble-spots of the twenty-first century: Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Kosovo and Palestine, amongst others. Many of the pictures are taken not from vantage points but from positions very much within the scenes they depict, almost as if the photographer is rubbing shoulders with the stretcher-bearers, fighters, troops and mourners that people the pages of the book. And the instants he favours are often those of heightened emotional content – extreme moments of maximum dramatic potential. Speaking from an hotel room in Jordan, while covering a story about Iraqi refugees for Vanity Fair, Pellegrin explained the rationale that underpins his work. PP: ‘In general I think photography is a really complex and deep language, and one that works at different levels. The first level, which is easily accessible (superficial, if you want, but not in the negative sense), is that which exists on the surface of the picture. You look at an image and it tells you something, and that's it. ‘I think the way this book is constructed, and also the way in which photography has to offer something as a language, is so as to have inside of itself the echo of something larger – what I call a metaphor. And I think by taking away a part of the information, which in this case is the caption, you in a way push (or force even) the viewer to engage – if you want – in a different or more profound conversation with the pictures. Pellegrin's abstraction of editorial content–and the parallel abstraction of pictorial information–is part of a process in which he attempts to make pictures that contain, as he says, ‘something which is unfinished or untold’. Thus the viewer of his photographs is enjoined to see them, not just as documents of specific historical and political events, but also as testimony to a different level of shared experience. PP: ‘I think these images ultimately speak about a condition, the human condition – an extreme human condition – where people are for the most part in or around conflict zones, and are dealing with issues of life and death and suffering. ‘But the pictures are also, symmetrically, of hope and courage and resistance, or of man's spirit to survive. And ultimately I certainly feel a sense of compassion, which I hope the viewer will also feel. And so these are the emotions that I would like – that I hope – the viewer might in some way or other feel themselves to be touched by, through the experience of looking at this book and these pictures.’ Pellegrin's humanism explains the book's title, a nod to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (which he had remembered from schooldays) and, more pertinently, an invitation to encounter another's suffering in a way that is both critical and reflexive. PP: ‘The ‘I’ isn't necessarily about me – it wants to be a universal ‘I’. Whoever the viewer is should hopefully, or ideally, become that, at least in part. I think we're all affected by human loss and suffering in one way or the other. ‘I'm trying to get in touch with the other – this unknown other – person that is in front of me. And, because of the nature of what I do, I meet people and maybe I'll never meet them again. And maybe we don't speak the same language. But still, because of my presence there and his presence there ... because of this encounter there can be a moment where there is an exchange, or there is an understanding, a tacit thing which happens. I try to capture that in photography.’

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