I recently attended a panel on The Future of Investigative Reporting.
Held at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in connection to the exhibition Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century, the panel strayed from photojournalism into a discussion of new models for journalism, and, as I blogged here didn't address the question I thought was implied in the context of the Cartier-Bresson show.
Don't get me wrong -- it was a very good panel, with:
David Cohn (http://spot.us)But I wanted to know: what would Cartier-Bresson do today?
Robert Rosenthal (http://centerforinvestigativereporting.org)
A.C. Thompson (http://propublica.org)
Lola Vollen (http://exonerated.org)
and documentary photographer
Susan Meiselas (http://susanmeiselas.com/).
It's easy to forget, as we celebrate individual works from HCB and discuss "the decisive moment," that he was a magazine photographer, and that his approach was generally that of a documentary photographer.
Today, the long trips (with an investment of time and money), the multi-page spreads, the public interest in world events beyond live coverage -- well, some would say that's all gone. Others might say it still exists, but for very, very few photographers.
So, would HCB be blogging? Posting clips on YouTube? Working toward a book, a documentary film, a museum exhibition?
More importantly: where would he take things next?
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