Context

One thing that triggered me lately was a comment by William Klein at the latest Visa pour l'Image photojournalism festival in Perpignan:

At a press conference in Perpignan, the celebrated American photographer has called on photojournalists to add more context to their images, as, he says about the festival's screenings that they fell like a "festival of shantytown after shantytown."

I sympathise with that view. I feel it's not only true of photojournalism in the strict sense but it applies to a lot of street and urban photography as well. As regards the latter, we have seen so many pictures of non-places, of delapidated industrial buildings, of sterile suburbia that I wonder what the point is. The study of urbanism I am currently engaged in alerts me to the superficiality of a lot of these photo projects. Maybe I am very wrong to expect that photographers think contextually and conceptually about their work. Maybe photographers do one thing, and designers do something else altogether. But Klein's remark reveals that also in the photographic world there are nagging questions about what the purview of photography is and should be.