Telling a Story - The World needs young Documentary Photographers
They are more popular than ever: Young photojournalists who tell about life of the people with their pictures, who elucidate from crisis and war zones with their pictures or who just take pictures from people´s everyday life to bring it closer. The documentary photography is versatile and heterogeneous. It delights the audience and fills in the gaps between text and story.
In Germany, the education of documentary photographers has a long tradition. Photojournalists are educated since the 1920s in Berlin and Munich. Pioneers such as Tim Gidal, Stefan Lorant, Felix H. Man, Gerda Taro, Marianne Breslauer and Gisèle Freund since then coined the major German newspapers, magazines and publishing houses.
A younger documentary photographer of today is Manuel Rivera-Ortiz. The Puerto Rican as an independent photographer successfully documented living conditions in developing countries. For example, the living conditions in Cuba, which he compared with those of his childhood in Puerto Rico. Or the dignity of the Dalit caste in India and the living conditions of the Aymara in the arid plateau of Bolivia. As more international, contemporary documentary photographers Robert Frank and Steve McCurry are to be mentioned.
New technologies and digital photography changed the genre in recent decades. The tendency to short sequences of images, snapshots and dramatically pathetic-charged images was created. This development came through the result of a dwindling amount of time, in which people absorb information.
Since the 1970s, the documentary photography then was increasingly considered as an art form. It occupied an important place in art galleries and museums. At this, always a construction of the world is to the fore in images.
The Wüstenrot Foundation is to be highlighted in Germany, which promotes and honours young talents of documentary photographers since 1994. Through this promotion very special additional up-and-coming opportunities result, that can be reviewed at the Lumix, an international photojournalism festival in Hannover. Here, every two years the best young photographers from around the world play a part in order to get their photo reports and essays evaluated and elected. The next Lumix Festival will take place from 15th to the 19th of June, 2016. We will keep you up-to-date.
