The ethic questions also involve photographers having subjects posing and fact-distorting caption writing, as displayed in two Chinese winners of 2004 World Press Photo competition. One of them, as mentioned above, caught a young man and a young woman wearing wedding dresses walking in the street during the SARS epidemic, and the photographer and his newspaper lost the suit for libel as they mistakenly identified two models merely in a show as a couple of lovers in the caption. In the prize winning AIDS photo essay, the photographer, who’s photographic education background in advertising photography, posed a female patient nude, which is against the local culture in Central China’s rural areas, and the dying female farmer in the picture appeared to try hard to grab a coverlid to cover her nude body with her unable hand. The photographer also asked an AIDS orphan to carry his parents’ portraits to the graves for photo taking.

　

  Taking a hidden camera to snatch shots of news value is also a common practice among photographers, since most photographers in China believe that they are ethically authorized to cover any thing in any situation. But victimized of their lenses are often people of vulnerable groups.

　

  Finally, there is the problem of taking “red envelopes” containing cash from the people inviting reporters and photographers to cover an event. The money is offered in the name of “transportation fee,” and is regarded as bribery news deal by some scholars.

　

Conclusion: Prospect

　Some problems now in existence could be settled soon, while others may remain for another decade. But China’s photojournalism will continue to grow rapidly since the coming 2008 Olympic Games and there is much room for development. Good pictures, better photographers and picture editors are demanded strongly by newspapers and magazines. A young generation of photojournalists, who were only working at fringe media, now starts to play the key role in the reform of China’s photojournalism.

　

    The People’s Photography, one of the two largest professional weeklies in China, asked its readers to recommend youth jury for its 2005 Press Photo Competition.　 He Longsheng, at 34 now, is one of the candidates on the list. Also on the list are Sun Jingtao, photography director of Da-zhong Daily in Shandong Province, Wang Jingchun, director of Visual (photography and Art) Department in Southern Metropolitan Daily in Guangzhou, and Li Jiejun, director of photography at New Express Daily in Guangzhou. All of them started their photojournalism career in the mid 1990s, and are in their prime time at mid 30s.

　

(End)

　

The Author: James Zeng-Huang is the picture editor with China Features in Beijing. He graduated from the photojournalism program in Syracuse University in 1991, and joined NPPA while he studied in the United States. He published photo book Life and Death in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1994, key-authored China’s first Picture Editing Handbook in 2003, and authored Photojournalism textbook in 2004.

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