Conversation: In photojournalism, the AI disruption is not here, yet

In April 2023, the Sydney Morning Herald's Managing Photographic Editor Mags King and Gold Walkley-winning war photographer Kate Geraghty sat down with Newsworthy editor Connie Levett to discuss the state of photojournalism in an era of fake news, advances in AI and why ethics matter.

Image: KATE GERAGHTY/SMH

First published Apr 5, 2023

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

What is your advice on people who want to pursue photojournalism?

SPEAKER_08 0:05

Well make sure that you have uh your heart in the right place. Like you're telling people stories for the right reason. Um, and that's to tell their stories. Um I think you find the things that you're passionate about and you follow that, you document, and you be persistent and be kind to people like Mags, picture editors.

SPEAKER_01 0:27

That was award-winning Sydney Morning Herald photographer Kate Gerritty on how to get started in photojournalism. Kate and Mags King, the Herald's managing photographic editor, recently sat down with Newsworthy editor Connie Levitt for a great discussion on photojournalism in an age of fake news. Mags is a photo editor with 25 years experience, a judge of the World Press Photo Awards, and curator of the Sydney Morning Herald's annual 1440 exhibition. Kate is a Gold Walkley winner and a three-time Australian press photographer of the year. The conversation touches on the ethics of taking photos in a war zone. Kate went to Ukraine three times last year. The research that allows you to capture great images and, of course, the potential impact of AI on the industry. We start with an acknowledgement of country from Associate Professor Helen Capel, and then it's over to Connie, Mags, and Kate.

SPEAKER_05 1:24

Okay, welcome everyone. It's lovely to have your company here this afternoon. So we are in this wonderful venue, which is the Esme Timbury Creative Practice Lab. And for those of you who don't know, Esme Timbury was, sorry, sorry, sorry, Esme, a Bidigal woman who is widely known for her shell art work that she does. And this venue is named in her honor and recognizes her work in this area and her contribution through this building, this landscape that we are in. And so I would like to begin by paying my respects both to her and her legacy and to the medical people of the Aeora Nation on whose lands we are working and studying today. I acknowledge their elders, past and present, and I would also like to acknowledge this land that we are on has never been ceded, and this struggle for justice continues until today. Without further ado, I would like to hand over to Connie, who's going to host the panel, and at the end we will have time for questions from all of you. So please make them feel very welcome.

SPEAKER_09 2:48

I just want to acknowledge before we start that we were hoping to have Nick Moyer, who's a colleague of Mag's and Kate, with us today as well. Unfortunately, the dreaded COVID-like symptoms have claimed him, and so he wasn't able to attend. So what I'd like to do, we've got a series of images that we're going to go through to help you see what Kate and Mags are talking about when we're discussing different issues. But I just thought we'd start off this sort of word photojournalism. You think of a journalist, you think of a reporter, you think of a photographer. Photojournalism seems to be a combination of the two. Kate, would you like to start us off just telling us what photojournalism means to you?

SPEAKER_08 3:38

So basically, it just means telling people stories through images, documenting the highs, the lows, every aspect of society, be it here, be it overseas. It's a huge responsibility because you get it right and there are so many ethics involved in how we do our job.

SPEAKER_09 4:02

So And we might unpack what decisions you make as you choose to take a photo and then the decision to publish a photo. But first I'll go to Mags. Mags, for you, what is photojournalism?

SPEAKER_07 4:17

Yeah, it it's it's worth unpacking definitely because within the realms of the newsroom, photojournalism is quite different as opposed to people who are free just to practice photojournalism. There is obviously aspects of photojournalism within the newsroom, especially with Kate Gerritty and Nick Moyer. But photojournalism for me is really the responsibility to seek, research, investigate, and document stories and issues that matter and in with the intention of affecting and shaping opinions and informing people, educating people. So it's a big responsibility and one that is definitely within the fabric of any you know society.

SPEAKER_09 5:05

So Mags, you have a special responsibility after photographs are taken. Am I right in thinking you are heavily involved in deciding which of the 40, 50 images a photographer might have taken on a job, which one is the one that is published?

SPEAKER_07 5:24

Yeah, I mean the responsibility comes from the very beginning when a story is, you know, workshopped within, you know, from the journalists to the editors, and um the photo editor should be part of that conversation. And often, you know, that's what we're trying to get into, all those conversations, so that you can have an informed decision that you make in assigning the right photographer for the job because that is important, that is actually really key to be a good photo editor. You need to know the capacity and the capabilities of all the diverse group of people that you have in the photographic department. And when that person goes out and and completes that job, when they when it comes back, you're hoping that it meets your vision or your requirements or what the newsroom requires out of that job, and then you want to narrow it down as much as you you can so that it sort of streamlines the decision making because I might want one picture to be you know on the homepage or on social media or in print, but essentially or the photographer will say, I actually like this frame, but essentially it involves the editor, the news director, the sub, you know. But yeah, it's having that sort of conviction to really back what you saw from the moment you know that story was going to be shot. Um so it's a it's a it's a long winded process, and then when it lands on the page and on the home page, it you know, it feels good when it's sort of it it uh delivers.

SPEAKER_08 6:52

It can also be years of research and following and keeping your eye on on the news, like not just you know, you could be day-to-day. Yeah, it couldn't you react to the day-to-day stuff or the you'd have projects, but some of the stuff is like a picture represents 20 years of contacts and your case and Nick Moyers, definitely.

SPEAKER_09 7:16

So this photo that we're seeing behind us now is a photo that Kate took in Afghanistan. Kate, can you talk to me a little bit about this photo and how there's a story beyond the frame as well as what we see here? Tell us where it is, is it Helmand? No, no, it's Urasgan uh province.

SPEAKER_08 7:37

It's near a place called Mirabad. These are elders. Uh we've just had, so we're going around Urasgan visiting um communities. So we didn't we've never done an embed. Um so visiting communities.

SPEAKER_09 7:51

Can you explain to the students what an embed is?

SPEAKER_08 7:54

Embed is where you are um you travel with uh a military and that's you you live with them, you go on patrols with them, you you are embedded in their their day-to-day life.

SPEAKER_09 8:08

And in that scenario is what you can photograph controlled?

SPEAKER_08 8:13

Well, if you do an embed with the Australian military or British or I mean all militaries actually, probably. Yes, so they will you know, when you can publish, what you can publish, where you can actually go. I've never been on an Australian embed, so I don't um but colleagues have said, you know, that would want to have gone on patrol in a certain area with a certain unit, but that's not particularly allowed. But you can, you know, they were you you're not given complete access. I mean they're controlling the narrative, not the Australian military, but you know, all military embeds. Uh so what is the story here you mentioned? So we've been travelling around myself and Paul MGO meeting communities, Afghanistan civilians, and this was the 10-year mark of the war, and so we were finding out, you know, what life was like for for people in Afghanistan. So before we got to this place, this this is at a police uh compound, so this is razor wire on the outside of the the um the building compound. Uh the night before they have police who are stationed all along the road and they walk towards each other and apart and towards so to check for IEDs.

SPEAKER_09 9:34

IUDs.

SPEAKER_08 9:35

IEDs is an unexploded device. What happened here is after a majority of the people who had left that we had sat down with and shared a meal with and spoke and listened to their stories for several hours, the police came in and laid an IED down in front of us and said someone in so it was mobile uh to be mobile detonated and um basically um someone with in the party that had attended um left. Not that well we don't know if these men, but someone who had left uh intended to to blow up when we drove along the road, it mobile phone detonated.

SPEAKER_09 10:20

So So has the journalist become a target within war the warscape now?

SPEAKER_08 10:26

Oh 100%. Like we uh Ukraine, I mean there are dozens of of media who have been uh murdered. Um and it's murder not, you know, there is no such thing as casualty of war. You know, when you're you've got media written on the side of your car, um you know, the Geneva Convention is thrown out the window with some militaries.

SPEAKER_09 10:54

So so Kate has, I don't know whether you'd say made a specialization, but has covered an awful lot of wars in in the time in the 20 years that I have known you. So I remember you being dropped off into the first Iraq War. Second, I'm not that long. It was the second. Sorry. It was 2003 when the World War. Right. But you've covered Lebanon, you've covered conflicts in Afghanistan, and now um going back as far as the invasion of Crimea in 2014, yeah. I know you were in there then. Congo, South Sudan. Yeah. W what were those two? Congo, like DRC, South Sudan. So in the last 18 months, you've spent quite a bit of time in Ukraine. These we now have a series of three images from Ukraine. Can you tell us, this is an image obviously from the front line. What are the constraints on you as a photojournalist taking images on the front line? Well, first of all, to get there is a hell of a thing.

SPEAKER_08 12:06

It's well, it's extremely dangerous. But things like, for example, see the the background, the the tree line. You can't show where you are because uh first of all, you have an ethical responsibility from the moment you leave this unit, you cannot have their deaths on your hands by publishing, you know, like so you can't show any identifying uh, you know, features in the landscape that will get people killed. Also, the Ukraine Armed Forces, um, this is a stipulation of of having um a armed forces accreditation card um or press pass, basically. So no one can go on a frontline or or pretty much anywhere and document without uh this armed forces card. And one of the rules is that you do not publish an image or video or you know, um a tweet or whatever showing that you what has just been bombed. So for example, the building next door, if that gets hit, you know, you go and photograph it, but you can't publish that image for at least several hours because uh the opposition military um or armed groups will see those images and go, oh, we didn't get building A1 or whatever, we got building A2. And so they'll re-bracket and hit this building. So some civilians um will get killed because of stupidity. And now these are really logical things that make sense in the calmness of you know, while we're talking about it here. But when you're in a war zone and you've got missiles coming in and you've got, you know, uh things going down, then you know, your logic can sometimes get um.

SPEAKER_09 14:02

So I personally have full disclosure, I have worked with both Kate and Mags over the course of my own career in journalism. So I have personal knowledge of them, of their values, of their journalistic ethics. But how does the audience, the person who reads the website, sees this image on social media, reads the newspaper, how do they know that they can trust what they're seeing? What what steps does the the Sydney Morning Herald take in an age where people can manufacture images, but they can say this is Ukraine in um 2023 where it might be Crimea from 2014 part of Ukraine.

SPEAKER_07 14:51

Well, I mean essentially you can't. So you're just gonna have to trust the the masthead, the brand that the Herald stands, you know, stands on. It is it's um we're bounded by everything that we do, Kate Garti, everybody, all the photographers in our team and and as well as the journalists, we're all bound by ethics. Um, and if it if it's a photo that we haven't photographed, it goes through a series of verification steps. I'm sort of involved in that, and then the lawyers involved, and so we take it very seriously. I mean, of course it's it's not 100%, and I know that in the past we I mean, I know that we've sort of um it wasn't actually us it was the age, um you know, made the wrong call, even though during the process I'd like to say that I didn't think this person was the right person, but it went ahead. Um so it does go through a certain amount of questioning and investigation, but as far as the photographers and what we produce, I mean it's so you have your own stable of photographers and you've got to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_09 15:57

Yes, which is the the privilege of as a large organization being able to support something which is expensive. It costs money to send people into environments, particularly dangerous environments.

SPEAKER_07 16:12

But we tend to sort of back the the topics or the expertise that we're that we're known for. Right. Like we don't send out everything everything, but obviously it's a discussion again, and you know, with Kate, Kate went to Ukraine three times this year. Last year. My gosh, yeah, 2023. Okay. You went three times. We had to have three this year, minimum. And it, you know, it went through a lot of conversation, and it's it's very costly. Kate went with a journalist, um, there's a lot of sort of security conversations, and when she's over there, there is the again, we follow the same sort of security steps throughout the day to make sure that everything is done properly for Kate and for the journalists, as well as you know, sort of ethical coverage of the whole thing.

SPEAKER_09 16:58

So there, as well as ethical coverage of the news event, there's an ethical responsibility to your team members, absolutely.

SPEAKER_08 17:06

Including the Ukrainian or the the local staff. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_09 17:10

So Mags has the inability to, or you have your verification steps, but the challenges to being able to verify, does that restrict the amount of user-generated content you will consider? Like a freelancer that might submit the most extraordinary photo, where does that land on your desk in terms of the decisions that would need to be made for you to be willing to publish it?

SPEAKER_07 17:40

So it's funny when you when you have questions like this, it sort of takes away the actual process when it actually does happen. It's usually about a story. It's people tend to send pictures that are relevant for that day or for that year or for that month. And so it sort of narrows it down. If somebody sends me a picture of, you know, Iceland with you know pigs flying, I mean, obviously not that to that stretch, but you know, it's we're sort of limited because A print pages, online has limited sort of, you know, um timings. So the picture, if it's really on point and you think, gosh, we must have this, yeah, that's a series of questions. But I have to say, I haven't seen one that makes me think that has fooled me yet, because the technology through Photoshop, you kind of know if something I remember one picture, and you might have been you might have still been there, it was a big shark or something, and then you can see that the tail is so disproportionate to the the head, and so there are lots of sort of um visual cues that you know alerts you to a to question it further, and then again you kind of think, okay, it's not worth it, you know, it's not worth the hassle. And also the the the the prices, the fee, the cost, and the reputational damage if you get it wrong. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you can there's ways of going around it, you know, like if this picture is going viral and you don't want to have the responsibility of actually buying it and running it and then being told that it was actually a false, you know, picture. You can, there are ways around it in sort of editorializing on the story that the picture has gone viral because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you get a screen grab, you credit the handle, the Instagram holder, or the photographer as it's been credited on social media. So there's ways of going around actually running a picture if you're not sure. Well, acknowledging the questions about its authentication. Exactly.

SPEAKER_06 19:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 19:32

We also had a um an incident several years ago, and it was during um the first, say, five or six years of the Syrian conflict, and this uh person had gone to Syria, um, not a journalist.

SPEAKER_09 19:47

Was this gay girl in Damascus, the blog?

SPEAKER_08 19:51

Sorry?

SPEAKER_09 19:52

Oh no, it's not all.

SPEAKER_08 19:53

It was um so images were supplied to, I think it was our lifestyle section, and they wanted to do this story. Anyway, they were like, Oh, you know, we went to Syria on this particular you know, these dates, and so she supplied some of her own, but she also supplied images that I knew for a fact had just won a world press picture, so she stole them, and also she the person didn't think that we were had been following this conflict for a long time or that, so basically thought we were stupid. I mean we we we can read Arabic, we we read the the number plates, it was they were taken in Holmes, not Aleppo. Like so captions matter as much as the pictures as well, and uh it goes also back to we've been covering news for a very, very long time.

SPEAKER_09 20:42

So that goes then to engaging with the story in a in a deep and meaningful way rather than just oh Syria's in the news this week, or it's sort of been Turkey, Syria with with the earthquake quake most recently. But if you have engaged, and again it's it's big organizations that have the ability to do this a little better, you have a knowledge build-up. Kate, I you speak I'm not sure what your Arabic's like now, but I know you've been learning Arabic. But so you start to build those extra parts to your toolkit then to help you. And and in this case, it helps you with with verification. This I just keep going through here. This is a series of three photos from um Ukraine that um uh uh Kate has done. This one is a casualty, Kate. Is this do you know the city this is from? Yeah, Kyiv. This is from Kyiv. Is that in the early stages of the war?

SPEAKER_08 21:47

No, this was June. June, yeah. So no, it's a second trip. Second trip, yeah. So yeah, June this year, uh last year. There'd been no missile strikes in Kyiv for quite some time. And then um we woke up at five in the morning to miss host rise. This lady is um uh survived. Uh her husband had been killed, she'd been pulled out of the top floor apartment, uh her daughter also had been rescued.

SPEAKER_09 22:16

What's what's the power of an image like this in telling the story of Ukraine when I think more Mariupol rather than Kiev, there were questions as to whether buildings were being bombed. What's the value of the immediacy of here is being able to say, well, here is someone who is a victim of the bombing?

SPEAKER_08 22:41

I don't know about the Mariupol buildings in question.

SPEAKER_09 22:46

That was the um children's hospital with the pregnant woman that they said was a yeah.

SPEAKER_08 22:52

We know the photographer.

SPEAKER_09 22:54

Oh yeah, no, there was no question that it was real. But the when false narratives are put out, do images like this that show you a reality at a certain time in a certain place that if required you could geotag, do they help to counter false narratives? Is that part of the value of you being in Ukraine three times last year? Definitely.

SPEAKER_08 23:19

Yeah, 100%. I mean, and also the AP photographer in Mariupol, you know, these are anyone who works for a wire, uh you know, um Can you tell the students what a wire is?

SPEAKER_09 23:32

Get EP AP Associated Press Reuters, Reuters. So there are agencies who sell photos to news organizations.

SPEAKER_08 23:42

Yeah, yeah. So they provide copy uh stories and images and videos. They're just a little bit older than the Herald.

SPEAKER_09 23:50

So so thinking back, we've we've seen uh the guy firing his weapon, we've seen this a casualty, the woman coming out, and this I thought was an extraordinary image because what struck me about this image was they're clearly living here. You know, this guy is on his uh on his armchair by the look of it.

SPEAKER_08 24:09

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's ill, so he can't move or leave, and that's why they haven't left their home. Um, most of the settlements and villages, towns, the people who have remained can't afford to to leave or can't due to illness can't leave. There are some elements of the communities who uh choose to stay because they're waiting for the Russian military to come, but they usually leave with the Russians when they retreat. Generally, it's 99.9%. Elderly and ill and very poor that can't leave. Because it costs a lot to relocate. You know, there's no NGOs, there's no refugee camps, it's uh hotels, it's apartments, schools.

SPEAKER_09 24:57

When I think of this photo and also the next one, which we'll be seeing a a number of photos by Nick next, to me it's a contextual story around the story of war, the impact on civil life on home life, on the home front. How do you find this story? How do you end up in someone's apartment telling this story?

SPEAKER_08 25:21

By going there and talking to the people. Um she was outside the front of her house uh cleaning up, and we have our colleague with us, a Ukrainian investigative journalist. So we we talk to people, and that's you know, they say, Oh, you know, Ole around the corner, he his house got bombed or struck by a missile yesterday, or you know, a couple of hours ago. So and you go around, it's the same as how you would find a story here. And you have to employ the same ethics that you do here with everyone. And it doesn't matter if uh who it is, like ethic-wise, and you can't be uh biased, you have to be completely impartial. We sat with or spent two days with Idris, one of the Bali bombers, going slightly off topic, but you have to afford him the same respect you would a survivor of the Bali bombing. You know, they're telling you their story, so which can be difficult sometimes. Your opinions don't matter that matter.

SPEAKER_09 26:27

But how do you in the case of the Bali bombing, which you guys might have just been born for? It's really surprising. 2002?

SPEAKER_08 26:40

Lucky we didn't show you any of the.

SPEAKER_09 26:41

Who was born in 2002? Are you kidding me? Ah, there we go, a couple of people. Wow. You must remember. Um no, so 202, largely tourists and some Indonesian hospitality staff as well were killed, 88 Australians. And in a nightclub bombing in um beach. And there was intense grief and anger. So when Kate talks about interviewing um and photographing one of the Bali bombers many years later, I guess, when when was the for 10-year anniversary. For the yeah, so 2012. She saw the aftermath. Yeah. Well, we knew people were bodies in there. Yeah. Like they were in there. Terrible burns and and and she was also following the journeys of the survivors and photographing them. So when she says I have to shoot a barley bomber objectively, that's actually a real a really focusing of the mind. You know, like barley bombing. Yeah. But it's an it's it was a great example, even if they'd never heard of it again. Social media and digital journalism, has it changed the way you photograph? Because it's a very different frame that you're providing the image for, isn't it? The beautiful detail here, would that work in an Instagram post? I don't I don't change the way I shoot. Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_07 28:14

I was about to say not. With any briefing, it's you always I always remind everybody that the content that you're shooting is going to end up on different platforms. Social media, online, print, and we uphold this the quality, the standard of photography. That is our role. We haven't really considered the sort of cropping. And the current newsroom, I have to say, it's been really collaborative. They are really uh receptive to all the images that we've been shooting, whether it's from Ukraine. I mean, this is a this is a long game. A long game is trying to convince people that photography is a it bypasses language, right? So and bypasses platforms. It's it should speak for itself. It it should it shouldn't be about, oh, I think you know, this is a prettier picture. It's not about the aesthetics, it's it's about the power, the visceral power of an image. So, but of course, the cropping in, you know, with digital, with everyone looks at their news with through their phone.

SPEAKER_09 29:14

So it does, there are lots of um compromises because we lose an image of a figure at a distance on Instagram, you just wouldn't get the well, I guess you can blow it up. But blow it up. A strong portrait image could, and we'll come to one of Kate's extraordinary portraits later, would I imagine have more impact in in an Instagram frame than a photo with extraordinary detail that you've got to be able to get in to see, that you know, or take it to a desktop or or however you might do it.

SPEAKER_07 29:51

Having said that, you know, you've got New York Times, they don't crop their images um on social media, they let it breathe. So they tend to have smaller frames because they they will run the full frame, uh, whereas we tend to sort of crop in to blow it up. And it's a bit of an argument because I I like the respect, but I get that people have you know milliseconds to just want the big hit very quickly. So if a portrait is really strong, then they do crop in very tightly.

SPEAKER_09 30:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 30:20

Compromises.

SPEAKER_09 30:21

I just want to quickly move through Nick's images here. Nick has specialized in, in some ways, in environmental disaster journalism. He he can take an extraordinary photo in many, many settings, but is it fair to say, I mean, this is the guy who goes tornado chasing on his holidays. He he has, as has Kate, been recognized at the highest level for their work. Extraordinary images. What struck me about this image was this is the floods in Western Sydney, I believe, out in the Hawkesbury River. I didn't realise what it was. What do you mean? This guy is standing on his roof. On his roof, yeah. I thought he was standing in a muddy paddock. No, I think it was a caravan park, was it? Or you can see, but it's only when you explore the picture that the enormity of the situation compounds. So, in some ways, or maybe I'm the only one that missed it, you have to do some work as as part of the audience, as the viewer, to fully appreciate. But once you realize he's standing on his roof, there's an oh my goodness moment about just the level of devastation. Nick is also not afraid to stand in the face of danger. This is a large wedge tornado in Texas, and I really wish I he was here because I would love to know how close that was to him. And if you ever see where that tornado went after he took the frame, did he get into a bunker?

SPEAKER_07 31:55

I I don't know because he's not here. But if you see any of his social media videos, I mean he is so happy right in that moment. It is extreme, isn't it? It's like, you know, most of us would be running. He's just can't believe that he's his luck to be there.

SPEAKER_08 32:10

He he spends well, he's an expert on weather, you know. Like he has, you know, studied it quite I mean it's not just gonna go up the road and have a look at something like it's a lot of research and yeah, I didn't mean to suggest that.

SPEAKER_09 32:27

Oh no, no, no, he was careless in I mean, he he measures the risks, but mm-hmm some of us might think the risk of being in that environment. Um Mags, this is a photo which was nominated for a World Press Award. Extraordinary photo from the 2019 bushfire season, 2019-20, taken in December. And I recall having a conversation with you about this photo. It was run, was it run full page on the on the front page of the Herald, I think? You know.

SPEAKER_07 32:56

Yeah, it was that this is actually we have a lot of arguments, Nick and I, because he believes that he has to be somewhere where again, because you might you might have four or five photographers covering one topic, as in the bushfires, of course, it's an amazing event, but he will say, No, I think it's gonna happen here, and I need to be here, and you kind of have to give in and say, Okay, well, you know, he's the expert. And he wasn't around this area for about three days, I believe. Whilst everybody's filing all over the place, Nick is just sitting there waiting, and I just I did feel like, wow, this better bloody happened. And um, I think it happened quite late, and he didn't make page one actually, because it was obviously it was it's incredible how they how he even finds the time to file when you're trying to capture something like this because you can't actually see what's happening in front of you, and um, he doesn't shoot automatically, you know, it's manual. So if you think about how incredible that picture is, and he wasn't aware of that sort of, I don't know what the technical term is, but that little He calls it a fire tornado. Yeah, yeah. He wasn't even aware on the left-hand side of the screen. Yeah. Honestly, when he saw this, I he then realized what he had captured.

SPEAKER_09 34:06

And also the power of that picture, you know. And that is the bush igniting. That's the moment it exploded.

SPEAKER_08 34:12

And also he helped save like a assist an injured fireman.

SPEAKER_09 34:17

Oh, did he?

SPEAKER_08 34:18

I mean that's a lot going on in that day. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_09 34:22

Yeah, but those how how high would those flames be? Well they're massive. Well, that's uh 25 metres, right? So that's I mean they're crowning. Hey, it's crazy. Very powerful. So you get this extraordinary power. And then and the courage to be there, to to do the work, to do the research, to capture it. And now end of stage left is AI. And as well as ChatGPT, which has had a huge amount of coverage, you've got the photographic version of that, which is DALI 2. I guess this is a next level of challenge for verification, isn't it? Will there be simple ways? I'm going to show you in a minute. I asked AI to give me a wall of flame in the Australian bush. And so I'll be able to show you what it gave me in a sec. But Nick did better. Will this be a new challenge? Is this something you're already having discussions about in the newsroom?

SPEAKER_07 35:19

Uh not in the newsroom, but definitely amongst, you know, ourselves. But it's it's really not quite there. So I'm not really as far as quality and you know, sort of the power of photography is not quite there within AI manipulation. But also, it's almost like what happened with the challenge of film going to digital, which is, you know, that was a big challenge to get over. So this is the next one. And a lot of photographers outside of photojournalism would probably be panicking more so now because, like shutter stock, I don't know if you're aware of Shutterstock, it's a stock, you know, they've got um, well, they're they've they're generating pictures as we speak. It's not photography, in my opinion, at all. Yeah. So they're generating AI, so they're actually inviting the designers and people who buy, usually buy pictures from Shutterstock to design your own picture. Are they identifying them as composites? Yeah, I mean they're definitely saying this is generated by um AI um facility, but essentially people like who shoot products, you know, makeups and and real estate and you know, interior photography, there's a lot of problems there because obviously people can stay at home and generate, you know, we want the CEO in a grey room. Okay, we can do that straight away. But then that sort of so it's a bigger impact on so many different levels because it impacts on NICON, Canon, because if if people like yourselves or amateur photographers who buy products that generally funds the bigger projects, the bigger professional cameras are not there because they're involving in sort of AI and you know, then they lose that market and the whole thing crumbles. The Kodak phenomenon.

SPEAKER_08 37:12

Right. Well, they've also stood, I mean, there's that court case magazine I were reading about today. Getty are suing an AI company for $1.8 billion for stealing their images to generate the background so they're stealing.

SPEAKER_09 37:30

Intellectual copyright is a whole new stopping.

SPEAKER_08 37:34

Yeah, it's not it's not photography, no confusion about it. It's got no place in a in a newspaper or the editorial. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, hey, you should have a look. They stole the the Getty uh watermark.

SPEAKER_07 37:53

Yeah. But you look at it, it's pathetic. I mean it's natural quality is not there. This is the thing. But iteratively it will get better.

SPEAKER_09 38:02

Just quickly want to touch on portraits before we go to questions because we're running out of time. We've got two portraits here. Kate, this is a lady in Ukraine.

SPEAKER_08 38:14

He ran on the front page with obviously the caption. Um, and so Ole is 51. He's been fighting in uh Ukraine on the front line since 2014. This is the second time he's been injured. So we're in a town called Bakhmut, which is currently under extremely heavy fire. The battle is raging out of control at the moment. And so I've photographed him in the corridors of what they call a medical stabilising point or stabilization point. So this is Ola's literally all the people who are in there being treated have come directly off the battlefront. And the battlefront is across the road, it's a kilometre away, it's it's so this is the first place where wounded come, civilian or military, and it's basically like the the ER department of a hospital, and then they're taken to a hospital. So he's sitting there, he's just been, you know, stabilized.

SPEAKER_09 39:11

So there's a story here, and a profound story which can be told, but his face is what will capture your attention to hear his story. So the first part of storytelling, the the window that takes you into that story is this extraordinary portrait. It's not someone's lead paragraph that they've you know spent an hour working on.

SPEAKER_08 39:33

Yeah, I think it's his eyes that start telling the story.

SPEAKER_09 39:36

Yeah, it's his eyes where you go and and the mouth, the the resilience in the mouth.

SPEAKER_08 39:44

He's not having the best day.

SPEAKER_09 39:46

And this is a portrait of a different kind and shows you it's not always the face that tells the story. Um this is from Mosul in Northern Iraq, isn't it?

SPEAKER_08 39:57

This is uh during the battle for to liberate Mosul. Oh yeah, from ISIS.

SPEAKER_09 40:02

Is this part of the package for which you won the Gold Walkley? The highest and his two other buttons in Australian journalism.

SPEAKER_08 40:09

Also died. All victims of of ISIS. So we don't even look, we don't only photograph people, we hear their story, but we will remember them for the rest of our lives.

SPEAKER_09 40:22

And that's a great place to finish and ask if we have any questions from the audience. Be kind.

SPEAKER_02 40:33

My name is Dennet. I do media, bachelor of media. I just wanted to ask um what got you into um photojournalism.

SPEAKER_07 40:43

It's funny because you're doing Bachelor of Media. So I did a degree in England um design media management, right? Because I was sort of observing how things were changing. To be a photographer or not photo photo editing, because I want to be a photographer, you needed some sort of business sense. So I did business and photography, which was kind of so that got me into that, and I I fell in love with photography, lacked a lot of confidence because it was a very male uh oriented career back then, back in the the dark days, um, dark ages. And um, but essentially led me to a job as a photo librarian slash manager for the British Army, did that for five years, and then it went on to newspapers in England, and then yeah, I came here in 2003. That that's how um I fell into it, really. But really, it wasn't a it wasn't a designation, do you know what I mean? It just sort of happened naturally kind of thing.

SPEAKER_08 41:43

Um I don't think I had any choice really. Um I just wanted to tell people's stories. Um I did two years of graphic design and was told that I um couldn't draw, so um no, I've I've always had a camera and yeah, I I don't think I had a had a choice. I love it.

SPEAKER_02 42:06

Okay, so I got another one. Um what is your advice on people who want to pursue photo journalism?

SPEAKER_08 42:13

Well, make sure that you have uh your heart in the right place, like you're telling people stories for the right reason, and that's to tell their stories. Um I think you find the things that you're passionate about and you follow that, you document, and you be persistent and be kind to people like Mags, picture editors.

SPEAKER_07 42:34

I I was about to say mental stamina, because now with the AI and everything else, it's there's a lot of challenges ahead of you. But if you really have this sort of sense of conviction that you want to tell people stories and you want you enjoy it, you know, there's no point in just saying that I want to cover because there's a real sort of attraction to covering, sorry, Kate, but you know, sad, heavy stories, right? But you've got to also own up to the fact that you must enjoy it. Because sometimes I I brief a job and people go, what am I gonna do with this? And I always think to myself, just enjoy it, enjoy it. What you're you're confronted with this very boring story, let's say, you know, a simple portrait. And when you have that conversation with the photographer and you sort of remind them about the beauty of portraiture and what are you trying to tell, it sort of engages them into a different space, and then it just reminds them what photography is all about. So if you get to know who you are, first and foremost, and uh yeah, follow follow it through and through, despite the challenges with AI, because they also think that AI would be a help to photographers in some way. And I'm sort of an optimist with that because I kind of think that as a follow on to what Jeanette has said, what where would be your starting place?

SPEAKER_09 43:54

If if if you're coming out of journalism school, media school, and you think I want. Be a photojournalist. You know, would you be doing things like going to World Pride and trying to take your own photographs, even if you never get them published, just to try and build up your skills.

SPEAKER_07 44:13

Build your portfolio. And it usually is in your front door, you know, your community. There are lots of stories, and they don't have to be sad. They can be joyful ones. They can be triumph, you know, a story of triumph. But literally challenge yourself to use your camera and your visual capabilities to tell that story without really and letting it happen organically as well. Because that's what happens really in real in real life. We can say where, when, what, you know, but literally cake can turn up and everything can be turned upside down. So it's about growing within yourself as well, you know, and noting it.

SPEAKER_08 44:50

Also, it's a lifestyle, it's not it's not a job. You can forget about attending some of your family's and friends events, you can like inspirational, okay.

SPEAKER_07 45:02

Inspirational.

SPEAKER_08 45:02

Well, no, I'm I'm being realistic. You know, one day I was having Christmas lunch and a tsunami happened, and then you're on a plane. You know, you you've yeah, it's not a job.

SPEAKER_00 45:14

Uh hello, my name is Daniel. I'm in first year. I was just gonna ask um when you're in sort of high stress situations, I noticed it especially with the one of the wounded woman in Ukraine. Um, do you ever find that you get like hostile reactions from the locals as if they feel like you're intruding when they're their most vulnerable or getting in the way almost when they're trying to do something really important? Like how do you react to hostility if you get it?

SPEAKER_08 45:36

Yeah, well, first of all, you don't um interfere. Um and yes, sometimes people can get um upset. Uh you have to be respectful. Uh also what happens is they want you to show uh the reality of what's happening. So something like this, um, like the the the wounded woman, all the emergency services uh had called uh us to to be there. So you know, you turn up, you'd get kicked out of an area like if if the authorities didn't have to be. You know, things like in uh the Lebanon War, you know, you you ask permission when you can. You know, there's I remember during some air raid strikes, yeah, we we asked permission. Some people that boy here we we asked his permission and his res you know reply was welcome to Iraq. Um yes, you can photograph me.

SPEAKER_07 46:31

So it's a valid point though, because a lot of a lot of photographers don't. But permission, yeah. And it becomes porn, you know, basically.

SPEAKER_08 46:41

Well during COVID, the general public were horrible to us. Here in here in Australia. Here in Sydney. Horrible. Lots of restrictions. Um and it was probably at the end, don't you think, like when you know, people had had enough. Um and we were well A, they thought we were trying to catch them out doing something. We were trying to document this extraordinary thing uh that was happening. Yeah. You you have to be prepared, you will be abused. And it's unwarranted a lot of the time.

SPEAKER_09 47:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 47:16

And people who are angry don't want to hear we're documenting for history, for you know, like you have to understand that they they're angry for reasons.

SPEAKER_07 47:26

It's also created by other photographers as well, because I know that there's some who are really aggressive, and the endgame is getting that amazing shot that's gonna win them an award, or the New York Times is gonna give them the job after the other. And and when that happens, it ruins a lot of opportunities for a lot of people because they'll remember that. You know, believe me, the Bushfires of 2019, and until now, I'm still hearing stories of how that person was chased by the fire brigade, blah, blah, blah. So you you must, yeah, you you should really start where you mean to how you mean to go. Yeah.

SPEAKER_09 47:57

Yeah, that's that's good advice. There's no time too soon to be a decent ethnic human being in the way you deal with your people. Sometimes the you won't get the same respect back, but that doesn't mean you should let your standards.

SPEAKER_04 48:15

Sure. So my name is Nora and I'm from like uh me art and media, but I was doing like uh PR and advertising. But I was happy to do this. So I might ask a very stupid question because I'm not really knowing much about photojournalism. So I'm wondering, like when you shoot in the picture, will you like a manufacture again? Because we know like uh the pictures, if we use a photograph to change a little bit color or different angles, it can make it very powerful. But if that way, it might lose uh genuine, you know, from the news. So I wonder how you can control that or you couldn't do that.

SPEAKER_09 48:55

So can I just clarify you're saying is what happens in the editing process after a photo is taken? Yeah and how much editing is involved.

SPEAKER_08 49:04

You can do barely nothing. And because we you cannot change a scene. You cannot clone anything out, you can't brightness contrast, that's it. Yeah, uh it's and you you will be sacked. Um it is digital manipulation and we see the same kind of manipulation of images, the same as manipulating words. If someone makes up a quote, it's the same as digitally, like changing an image. We don't do it.

SPEAKER_07 49:33

So it's with within this realm, it's lit literally just brightness and contrast. That's it. It's photojournalism. And for design purposes, you might end up cropping the image. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 49:43

But that's just it can't alter what you've seen in any way.

SPEAKER_07 49:49

With magazines, it's entirely different. Yeah, magazines they can do almost whatever. But that's not editorial or news. Okay, got it.

SPEAKER_04 49:57

So it's a totally regional what you shoot and then present in the news like what you see in a newspaper is what has occurred.

SPEAKER_07 50:08

Yeah, I mean I'll give you an example with the protest um 2020, I think, you know, with the I don't know if you're familiar with the picture of the man punching the horse. I don't know if you see that. Went viral. So that was a herald photographer, Brooke Mitchell. When it happened, when it was filed, the the head of the newsroom called me and said, it's getting a lot of flack, it's going viral. Should we run it because people are saying that we've manipulated the picture? Because his hand touched the horse's face, right? Whereas others, other photographers filed from wire agencies, the the uh the it didn't touch the horse. And I was like, for a start, we do not manipulate anything. Secondly, it went viral because of the actual context, because of what's happened. And I I think we you run it because it's ethically, you know, you're reporting on what's happened. Yeah. And that's your job, you know.

SPEAKER_08 50:59

And if if the public are reacting, then we're we've informed them about something. You know, the the default, it shouldn't be that it's fake. I mean, it's like this just happens. One more question.

SPEAKER_03 51:15

Um My name's Kale, I'm a third-year journalism student. Uh so a lot of the existing uh literature on the state of photojournalism is written pre-pandemic. Um so I was wondering uh in a post-pandemic world, uh, has that exacerbated some of the issues in the industry, or has it perhaps opened new avenues for the profession to thrive?

SPEAKER_07 51:36

Interesting. Um pre-COVID, uh, the big concern was that newsrooms were sacking photographers. So I had a lot of people asking me, you know, what's the future for photojournalism? Daniel Barahulak, who shoots for Australian, who shoots for New York Times, I think he's a staff now, isn't he? He's a staff, he's been made a staff. But but his comment was: I remember asking him that question, and he said, Um, well, no, actually, I'm finding now I have more control to seek the stories and then to take control of how I want that published, i.e., he's targeting New York Times or whatever. And we worked through COVID when everybody was at home, photographers were on the road documenting it. Has it exacerbated any issues as far as doing the job or uh I meant more particularly just uh the future of it?

SPEAKER_03 52:26

Yeah, the future of it.

SPEAKER_07 52:27

Um look, I've I've just judged World Press, so two years in a row, and believe me, Southeast Asia, which is the region that we're in, um, is actually quite exciting because the the number of young photojournalists who are documenting the stories in Cambodia, in in all these different pockets, you can see by the the editing, the style, the quality that they're young. But that to me is hopeful because the fact that they know World Press and whether WordPress, it's then a job for WordPress to then educate and inform people how to edit and all these things, it means that it's still there, it's still very much powerful, that there's a lot of people that who really want to do this for a living. And certainly World Press has been around since the what, the 50s.

SPEAKER_08 53:11

And you can find all the ethics um and rules about um digital manipulation on on the World Press website. So that's what we adhere to, and then also we adhere to like the UNICEF child protection protocols, like there's you know, and also the Geneva Convention, like there's a whole you've got to do research yourselves to just finally to wrap things up, one of the big stories this year, I imagine, will be the voice.

SPEAKER_09 53:40

How do you go about recording and documenting that? Do you have a strategy for that? Is it a case of news event by news event?

SPEAKER_07 53:50

Interesting, yeah. So we did a project recently. I don't know if you've you've seen it with Caitlyn Fitzsimmons, and Caitlin is a journalist, and um she went to lots of different areas in northern, all the way to I think Queensland with Janie Barrett, one of the photographers. And how we wanted to tell the story was to do these talking heads, you know, sort of video TikTok style because it's vertical rather than, you know, we still shot it with the camera because we wanted the quality, and then it was set edited afterwards in the TikTok style. I think that is really interesting because it's kind of raw and a bit more authentic, it's not polished, you know, it's what people have to say. So I guess in that's how we've started off. And I think that's the way we want to go because, and obviously, we will be doing lots of portraits of you know, um, key speakers and key people in the community. But as far as documenting it without as photojournalists, we haven't really taken that on board. I mean, I know we're coming into March already, but it's it's just been so busy with other things, so we haven't really targeted it as a as a project as such.

SPEAKER_09 54:57

All right. Well, look, thank you so much. I'd just like you to put your hands together and thank Mags and Kate. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Thank you for coming.

SPEAKER_01 55:07

Very busy women. Thank you for sharing your time. Thanks for listening. I'm Rihannin Lidbury, and this has been a Newsworthy Podcast.