In short, photographs carry an implicit documentary value and evidentiary function that lens culture everywhere certifies. Which is why what the VII Foundation, the Associated Press, and World Press Photo have achieved in their collective efforts on the making of “Napalm Girl” matters, deeply, regardless of their flaws. […]
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Because it concentrates on first-person testimony while paying scant attention to this important physical evidence, I find The Stringer persuasive and even compelling, as I wrote earlier, but not conclusive. In my opinion, it fails to make an effective evidentiary case to support the charges it levels. […] Treated purely as dramaturgy, “The Stringer” is cinematic gold. If this came to you as a fictional Hollywood movie, you’d buy into its storyline in a minute. Which poses a problem in the documentary context, because a good story doesn’t have to be true. It doesn’t have to be credible in every detail. It doesn’t have to prove its case with hard evidence. It only has to be engrossing. […] I’ve tracked the uproar over The Stringer since it first became news. Watching all this unfold has evoked a number of ruminations — not just on that photo, the film, and the charges involved but on the forensic investigation of photographs as a project. […] By the end of the twentieth century, you and your classmates were reading about the disposition of this or that photographer’s life’s work. Some did it well, some did it badly, and some didn’t do it at all — so the stuff got tossed out, or damaged, or dispersed, or simply vanished into thin air. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |