This is the Home Page of New Mexico State University’s Visual Journalism Department. The site exists to publish the work of students engaged in the appreciation, consideration and production of Visual Journalism. Students post their stories here, using Images and Text to explore the world through the means of Photojournalism, using Still Photography, Video and and Multimedia.
J320 is a general editorial-oriented class that is storytelling-oriented class. It’s about capturing images in milliseconds of time, fully realizing that still photography can edge a world’s timeline into a sliver of photo capture. It explores the world as it is, encourages truthfulness and ethical image-making and requires a respect for high craft skills. The core belief in this class is that photojournalism is done for others’ consumption and consideration, that the people photographed are the entire point of doing this genre of photography and that to do photojournalism effectively, the “shooter” must commit to total engagement with their subject matter.
The class is about who is outside the lens side of the camera not the person on the camera side.
The focus is on doing one-time shoots and extended projects. It concentrates on the idea of “depth” in reportage. It asks students to immerse themselves in a subject, visiting it, re-visiting it, becoming an “expert” on it. The product of good photojournalism photography is to create a body of work that lets viewers know the truth of a situation, a place, a people. Sometimes that can be done in a one time snap. Sometimes it takers a lifetime.
Good photojournalism’s goal is truth, arrived at sincerely, via the effort of a “concerned photographer.”
