Highlight on blight

Here's an online article that's very relevant to our class discussion about photojournalism this past week:
http://www.viceland.com/int/v16n8/htdocs/something-something-something-detroit-994.php

The article subtitle summarizes the point quite succinctly: "Lazy Journalists Love Pictures of Abandoned Stuff". It looks at the trend of many journalists and photographers going Detroit in the past year to write about that city's severe economic hardship. While there is much to say and show about the dire situation there, this article points out that most of the stories and pictures have focused disproportionately on the crumbling buildings, shuttered factories, and other scenes of blight. Many of these pictures have narrowly shown only the decrepit buildings but left out some background that undermines their premise - commercial buildings still actively used and containing vibrant businesses.

This provides another example of how many photographers and their reporter colleagues tend to include only anecdotes and pictures that support their story theme, in this case, the sharp decline of a major manufacturing city. The death of GM and Chrysler has undoubtedly caused great hardship in Detroit, with ripple effects still occurring, but it doesn't help the readers when the stories show only scenes of decay. The photos seem to almost revel in the disturbing pictures - it's not too much of an exaggeration to call some it this "ruin porn".

What also seems a bit odd to me is that Detroit has been in bad shape for a long time now (since the early '80s), so it's current plight is nothing really new. The severity of this recession and it's impact on the city is probably much greater now, but that point is often overlooked in most of the news stories. The recent series in TIME magazine is an interesting one - it does show a lot of the problems, but also gives some discussion on ways the city can recover.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1887864,00.html

Although the 'Vice' article is a bit snarky in tone, it does provide another example of how some journalists can manipulate pictures to support a story's theme.