Page 12 - Capture Nov-Jan 2021

a look back at 2020 editorial
EditorialThe Year
It’s difficult to think of a year in recent times more eventful and more tumultuous for photojournalism and editorial photography. Especially in Australia. How have photojournalists worked through a most challenging time? Sam Edmonds reports.
While
But certainly, the history books will also note the disastrous fire season that prefixed the pandemic outbreak in this country – one of the worst on record, and with unprecedented loss to homes, lives, and wildlife. Recognising the extent of this, an array of some of Australia’s biggest photojournalist exports returned home to cover the disaster, including Andrew Quilty, Adam Ferguson, and Daniel Berehulak.
No stranger to covering disaster, and having won a Pulitzer Prize for doing so, Daniel Berehulak says his choice to cover not only the main event of bushfire outbreaks, but also the fallout in South Australia, was as deeply personal as it was professional. “It just felt wrong not to cover this story,” he says. “I went to Kangaroo Island to see the extent of the damage caused by the fires, and there I met an amazing group of people that were dedicated to rehabilitate the island. As a kid, I grew up on a farm out near Werombi...so this was really a story that hit close to home for me.” Known for his work covering Ebola as well as Philippines’ drug wars, and floods in Pakistan, Berehulak’s work for magazines around the world has focused squarely on large-scale disasters and epidemics, but even for someone so versed in this sort of turmoil, the Mexico-based photojournalist admits that bushfires and COVID-19 were a string of events that brought a constant sense of unease to an ex-pat whose family is now split across continents: “I have a life in Mexico City, and we started quarantining pretty early on, so I decided to stay home with my fiancée and our two dogs, but I keep in regular contact with my family in Aus, and we check in on each other regularly.”
And as for the future of making a living reporting on such events around the world? “Photojournalism is going to be deeply impacted,” Berehulak says. “I think budgets are being cut, editors are wary about sending people into the field; and just like most businesses, photojournalism is going to be affected. Nevertheless, I believe that this has been such an eye-opening experience for all of us, and the learnings that we will get from this in the long run are going to be invaluable.”
Ground Zero
In early April, while the COVID-19 pandemic tightened its grip on most of the planet, most of the world’s gaze shifted to the United States as their poor handling of the initial outbreak meant stories focused on the astronomical number of cases, and photographers were assigned to the cover the crisis unfolding around the country. But, perhaps uniquely to the USA, outbreaks in the social justice
the first few months of the year saw the biggest names in local talent returning to home soil to cover the worst bushfire season in recent history, this disaster quickly segued into the COVID-19 outbreak — a phenomenon that would prove at once the biggest talking point for reportage, journalism, and documentary photography, but also the single biggest source of income loss for photographers, and the publishing industry, in a single year. While 2020 will undoubtedly be remembered as a year that most choose to try and forget, it will also be remembered as a year that changed the face of photojournalism and editorial photography forever. From street photography in New York City to the remotest of islands of Southern Australia, a complex web of issues has united photographers across the globe to band together during a global pandemic and say in unison; “OK, now what?”
MAIN: Farmers, friends, and neighbours ready their water- laden trucks in order to battle approaching running fires to defend cattle on Bredbo Station, NSW, on 1 February, 2020.
ABOVE: New York City, 2020.
Fanning the flames
Without doubt, the global COVID-19 pandemic will be noted in history as an event that impacted the lives of almost all Australians.
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