As the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper was making plans to lay off its entire photography staff, Fred Ritchin was putting the final touches to his latest opus, Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen. Keenly aware of the current dismal state of traditional media, the former picture editor of The New York Times Magazine and professor of photography and imaging at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts prefaces his essay with 16 questions and two pages full of interrogations about the future of news - photography in particular.
Looking at a world where "image-making has become a form of communication nearly as banal, instinctive and pervasive as talking", Ritchin asks: "Do we need - even more than we need photographers - metaphotographers who are capable of sorting through some of the billions of images now available, adding their own and contextualising all of them so they become more useful, more complex and more visible?" In other words: "How does today's image-maker create meaningful media?"
Source (http://www.bjp-online.com)