Paolo Pellegrin And The Future Of Photojournalism

Paolo Pellegrin has been widely regarded as one of the world's best photographers for a decade now, at least since he won the Kodak Young Photographer Award in 1996. But in a little over a year, Pellegrin has made a major breakthrough in his work that places him at the forefront of contemporary photojournalism.

In 2005, the year he was elected to full membership in Magnum Photos, Pellegrin created several bodies of work that connect with the tragic dimension of a world in chaos in ways that few other photojournalists have. In these images, he distilled the emotional essence of a news story simply by reducing the information within the frame to a single gesture or the look on a human face.

Such was the case with the close-up portraits that Pellegrin made of mourners at the wake of Pope John Paul II, quiet studies that won him the 2005 World Press Photo award for portraiture.

"I was stunned by the power of those portraits," says New York Times Magazine photography editor Kathy Ryan. "Somehow, Paolo had gone into a crowd of people and made portraits that transcend the immediate event."

Most striking about the series is its daring simplicity: Faces alone tell the story of collective grief.

"Why Paolo is important now," says Per Folkver, director of photography at the Danish newspaper Politiken and one of the jurors for the 2005 World Press Photo, "is because he seems to have the guts and the courage to be personal." Folkver explains, "You are never in doubt that this is a story he wants to tell in a specific way. He is not just a man holding a camera. He is eager to tell a story in a very personal, precise way."

Pellegrin, 42, makes no claims for himself as an innovator. He names Magnum stable mates Alex Majoli and Antoine D'Agata as among the photographers he feels closest to in spirit these days. And, he says, like many other photographers, "I'm definitely, as many are, the son of Gilles Peress and Koudelka and Eugene Richards and Robert Frank. There is a line."

Pellegrin does believe, however, that photojournalism is now evolving toward a new paradigm.

"Every ten years or so, there is a body of work that is one step further, a breakthrough in the history of photography," he says, citing William Klein's Life is Good & Good for You in New York (1956), Robert Frank's The Americans (1959), Josef Koudelka's Gypsies (1975) and Gilles Peress's Telex: Iran (1983) as books that signaled past seismic shifts in photojournalism.

The dominant influence of Gilles Peress over the past 20 years has been an esthetic of inclusion, of packing as much as possible into a picture, often with vertiginous, tilted horizons and imagery falling into and out of the frame. The busy, multilayered views of Peress were ideally suited to an age of upheaval, but as the world has moved into an era of terror, something different seems to be required to overcome the numbing effects of relentless violence and repetitive, often superficial news coverage. The new direction for photojournalists in the 21st century is one of reduction and exclusion. And Pellegrin's recent work has put him in the vanguard.

"I spent 20 years thinking of how to give a photograph the dimension it doesn't have?depth, layers," says Pellegrin. "It got more and more complex. At some point, the opposite process occurs?deconstructing, subtracting, taking away. I sense a critical mass, which will generate another body of work and redefine photography. It could be this process of taking away."

This "process of taking away," Pellegrin says, really amounts to "searching for the essence of a story."



What all photojournalists are up against is a media-saturated society in which the public is constantly bombarded with imagery?from 24-hour news channels, newspapers, the Internet?that they increasingly distrust as manipulative and manipulated.

"What I believe is happening in documentary photography," says Folkver, "is that we are leaving the very formal way of looking and we will go into a more simple way to tell stories that is even more powerful. We have a lot of visual noise in our society. To be different, you have to be a little silent. Paolo will not fill his pictures with photography noise."

Of the thousands of photographs Pellegrin has taken of conflicts around the world, the one image that stands out most in his mind is a 2002 picture of a funeral in Jenin, Palestine, following an Israeli raid. The young mother of a child killed in the attack swoons into the arms of other mourners, the whole crowd seeming to well up out of a dark landscape of loss.

"There are moments when a photograph is just given to you," says Pellegrin. "It is offered as a gift to a photographer. It doesn't even belong to you."

This portrait of grief blurred into eloquence may, in fact, be the image in which Pellegrin's emotional response to a story sent him off in a new direction that upped the ante for photojournalists everywhere. The Jenin funeral photograph stays with him, he says, because it captures "the one gesture that says everything."

"Essence is not given by the style," he says. "You have to connect with the event and with the tragedy."

Having discovered the visceral power of the portrait as a vehicle for storytelling, he returned to it again, not only in covering the Pope's funeral, but also in a series on survivors of Israeli air strikes in South Lebanon (where he himself was wounded), and most recently, in a New York Times Magazine cover story on the American detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

At the beginning of this year, he did a series of Madonna-like cameo portraits of Pakistani earthquake victims.

"I was there six months after the earthquake," he explains, "so I was trying to render what is invisible?the interior scars and trauma and wounds."

This struggle to reveal what is transcendent in a story is not limited to his portraits.

Jamie Wellford, photo editor at Newsweek where Pellegrin is a contract photographer, notes, "He's had a sensational run since the tsunami." He explains, "Paolo is a master at landscapes, more so than most photographers I know. He is capable of animating emptiness."

Pellegrin brought an almost biblical aura to his photographs of the 2005 Indonesian tsunami?fishing boats washed up like Noah's ark, landscapes washed away by an apocalyptic flood. In his eerily calm seascapes, he managed to achieve his goal of depicting "a landscape that contains a memory of something."

"Decontextualized, it loses all sense," says Pellegrin of his image of the empty sea off Indonesia, "but in context it can have the ominous presence of this thing that was."

Olivier Picard, former photo editor at U.S. News & World Report and now illustrations editor in the book division of National Geographic, says he first noticed the increased intensity of Pellegrin's landscapes in photographs he did of destroyed villages and refugee camps in Sudan's troubled Darfur region in 2004.

"He did something I didn't see in other stories," says Picard. "He penetrated into the story and gave it depth. The sense of place and mood he captured was not like anything anyone else has done."



Pellegrin most often finds himself photographing in distant trouble spots, but his assignment to cover the Pope's funeral took him close to home.

Pellegrin was born in Rome in 1964. Both of his parents were architects, and he, too, was well on his way toward a career in architecture when, in an act of youthful rebellion during his fourth year at university, he decided to become a photographer instead.

"It was quite a long process, nearly ten years of working, printing and assisting," says Pellegrin of his early years as a freelance photographer in Rome.

In the early 1990s, Pellegrin bought an old car and moved to Paris where he showed his portfolio to Christian Caujolle at l'Agence VU.

"Christian must have seen something in the work I had shown him. He decided to take me on."

Working with VU and the Italian agency Grazia Neri, Pellegrin began to travel more widely, photographing the effects of violence and disease in Uganda and Rwanda, Cambodia and Algeria, Bosnia and Kosovo. In 1996, he won the Kodak Young Photographer Award at Visa pour l'Image in Perpignan for his study of AIDS in Uganda. In 2000, he won his first World Press Photo award for his work in Kosovo; he won another in 2002 for his dark, ominous images of the war against terrorism in Algeria.

In 2001, he was awarded the Leica Medal of Excellence and was invited to join Magnum.



AS Paolo Pellegrin emerges as the wayfinder of photojournalism, Kathy Ryan cautions, "It's not a trend. It's him."

Not yet anyway.

"Paolo is influential," insists Newsweek's Wellford. "His effect is going to loosen up framing and make people reconsider how they approach photography."

Caujolle, who took a chance on Pellegrin when he was a relative unknown, warns against allowing a mature style to become formulaic.

"His recent evolution with the use of close portraits is producing very strong photographs," says Caujolle, "but I think he has to be very careful to avoid the fact that his treatment can become too much systematic."

And Pellegrin agrees. He has seen other photographers fall into the formula trap and he intends to keep moving beyond style to substance as he continues the process of subtraction and refinement in his imagery.

"There isn't a system," Pellegrin says of the search for this essential gesture. "If there were a system, that would be the death of it. By some alchemical process, you translate who you are and your own experience into the picture."

Pellegrin ultimately sees photography not as a definitive statement on a subject but as "an invitation to a dialogue" that must leave room for the viewer.

"Photography is my chosen vehicle for understanding. I hope the work I do also makes other people aware of things, possibly to ask the same questions that I ask myself when confronted with a situation," he says.

"I'm interested in photography which has a sense of asking questions, in a photography which is more unfinished."