Mike Bealing
With its commitment to ‘real' news stories, TIME magazine has, since the first issue was published in 1923, maintained its mission to be open minded and informed in its reporting - to make a ‘complex world more coherent'. A key element of this honest style of reporting has been the use of photography. Mike Bealing, Photo Editor for TIME EMEA spoke to HSBC to help give potential entrants some guidance and inspiration by discussing the power of photography.
Q: What, in your opinion, makes a good photograph?
Mike Bealing: As in most forms of art, a photograph should make you stop in your tracks. It should make you laugh, smile or cry, but most of all make you think. In journalism, a photo should make the reader stop on the page and read the story below.
Q: What is the quality that all great photographs have in common?
MB: Photography is a broad medium, but a great portrait will capture the soul of the person, often through the eyes, sometimes by the hands or body language. A news image has been framed or composed by the photographer who has understood from where the action is coming, and where the flash-point is likely to arrive. News photography isn't just about pointing your lens in the right direction and pressing the button - it's about predicting where and when that point comes.
Q: What was the last photograph that surprised you and why?
MB: Spencer Platt's photo which won the World Press Photo of the Year award for 2006 is an astounding photo. It is of young Lebanese visiting a bombed neighbourhood in southern Beirut and is a good example of an 'astounding' picture. Lebanese drive down a street in Haret Hreik, a bombed neighbourhood in southern Beirut, Lebanon. Look at the faces and the clothing of these young people who have inadvertently driven down a recently-bombed street. They are probably off to a party somewhere and the tragedy of what has just happened takes them completely by surprise. It's a photo which shows the complete contrast of the two halves in Lebanon.
Q: Is the photography featured in TIME magazine art or journalism?
MB: It's both. In that I mean that our terrific news photographers have turned the job into an art form (take a look at Jim Nachtwey's Darfur images, or Thomas Dworzak's coverage of New Orleans), whereas our portrait photographers can tell, as the saying goes, a thousand words in one photo. Tom Stoddart's photos of Mikhail Gorbachev or Isa Lorenzo's picture of the green activist Von Hernandez tell you an awful lot about the demeanour of the men, their standing and the task they face.
Q: The emergence of digital/ mobile technology means that everyone today can be a photographer. Is this a good thing?
MB: It's a difficult one. On the one hand the London subway bombings in 2005, for instance, would not have been covered photographically so extensively without mobile cameras. Every other passenger on those trains had a camera-phone and many recorded their experiences, then sent them to media organisations. There were no professional cameramen on the trains to capture the moment. So that's when it is a good thing. A passer-by catches a robbery, an assault or some other spilt-second incident on his compact digital camera. It's something we see more and more now.
I do worry, however, about the regulations governing what gets ‘staged' onthe web and in other media. We have seen incidents of bogus images being supplied to newspapers, magazines, websites etc which turn out to have been supplied by amateurs, or at least non-professional photographers. Personally I would be very wary of the authenticity of a photo from ‘the man on the street' but some publications have been less careful.
