Book review by: Nicholas Demille
Making photographs is a complex, personal act. Jim Lo Scalzo
seems to make photos to earn money, to justify travel, to avoid dealing with
personal feelings, and as the title of his book suggests, to serve as evidence
of his personal existence. Interestingly, the last of these reasons is opaque
to the reader until the final pages of the book, and the evidence of Lo Scalzo’s
existence, it seems, is not simply about the act of making photographs.
Jim Lo Scalzo, a long time photojournalist for U.S. News and World Report, writes about
his rise to one of the top positions in the industry, and the work it requires
of him when he gets there. His chapters jump back and forth from a vaguely
present-day voice, in which he details assignments to foreign place such as
Iraq, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Texas and the Dakota Nation; to an historical
voice, in which he details his childhood, and the growth of his love for
photography.
Lo Scalzo doesn’t exactly glorify photojournalism as a
career choice—far from it. He self-effacingly reveals his own insecurities
through the lens of his career behind the camera. Lo Scalzo invests himself completely
in his career in a way that he realizes later, was designed to protect him from
confronting his own feelings. He spends much of the book capturing the anguish
of others, in part, to avoid confronting his own.
Lo Scalzo’s stories paint a vivid picture of life lived on
the road. He clearly enjoys writing about injuries, diseases, and the frequent
brushes with death that accompanied his trips to areas destabilized by war and
natural disaster. But under his layers of bravado, there are some heartfelt
nuggets of wisdom.
Lo Scalzo knows that his itinerate lifestyle is symptomatic
of a larger truth—that the constant business of making images is an excellent
way not to deal with his own troubles. In the end, it seems that becoming a
father, not a successful photographer is the pivotal moment. He comes to appreciate
life, not just from a photographer’s perspective, but from a subject’s
perspective as well. The world of f-stops and shutter speeds, which he seems to
understand so well, becomes far more complex once he is forced to put his camera
back in the bag and deal with unmediated reality.
Of course, mediated reality is not a new conceptual problem
for photographers. It has long been the critique of photojournalists in
particular that they act as documentarians first and human beings second. Lo
Scalzo avoids dealing with the extremes of this particular debate. His book is
about a man who grows up as a working photojournalist. Lo Scalzo is a man who
becomes self-aware, and it turns out, he makes photographs for a living.
If you are looking for a book that gives you creative ideas
about making photographs, Lo Scalzo’s book will disappoint. He speaks
practically about how he prepared himself for tough assignments. And it would
seem that young photojournalists would feel reaffirmed by some of the idealist
notions he held when he was starting out. The idea that you can get paid to
travel the world and document significant historical moments is what probably draws
most young people to photojournalism. Lo Scalzo admits to idolizing National Geographic photojournalists,
and frankly speaking, what photographer doesn’t? But just as Lo Scalzo must
come back to earth with regard to the denial of his feelings, readers must
likewise come back to earth with the demise of the great photojournalist. Lo
Scalzo, like many photojournalists, succumbs to what we now understand as the
death of domestic print journalism, and the death, to a large extent, of the
foreign correspondent. And this brings up a final, more profound point. The
greatest evidence of Lo Scalzo’s existence might not be that he struggled with
the human condition, but that he did so, as a photojournalist, at an
historically significant time period for photojournalism as a discipline.
The rise of Internet publications and globalization have removed
the barriers to cheap photographs from photojournalists who are expert in their
own regions. And while professional photojournalists still stalk the world to
make amazing photographs, it is no longer necessary, nor financially feasible
in most instances, for Western print publications to send highly-trained, well
paid photojournalists like Lo Scalzo to far-flung regions to take photographs
when they can simply pay local journalists in far-flung locations to do it more
safely and more cheaply.
Photojournalism as a discipline carries on a tremendous
legacy of sometimes narrowly, but always engagingly, freezing moments in time. And
Lo Scalzo has unwittingly documented the death of Western dominance in this
regard, with the transition of photojournalism to a more globally democratized
system of content creation. Lo Scalzo, as a professional photographer, has
something profoundly interesting and historically unique to say about a career
in photojournalism that will largely cease to exist in the form he enjoyed it.
Pick up a copy and enjoy being a voyeur, but don’t read it because you want to
follow in his footsteps. In this regard, you are almost certainly bound to be
disappointed.
