Reportage Photography Report

Tony Tedham

Reportage photography is way of telling a story through the style of photographs as these
pictures have captured a specific event. This is done in a documentary style so the viewer
/reader gets an overall perspective of an event as if had really happened in front of them.
Alongside these pictures there is some text but it is the pictures which tell the story.
Reportage photography is called photojournalism and, despite there being text, the editor
knows the pictures will say a lot more or even back up what has been written.
Photojournalism can be seen in a lot of magazines and mainstream newspapers and is
frequently used when a celebrity is getting married or other special events like film
premieres are taking place.
An example of photo essay is of Gun Nation by Zed Nelson.
http://www.zednelson.com/?GunNation:1


People engage in social drinking for various reasons. The basic definition of social drinkers is
people who drink in order to be social. But this breaks down into a number of categories.
The classic British social drinker goes out, often with work colleagues, and drinks in order to
relax from the stresses of the working week with those colleagues although this sometimes
leads to drinking to excess.
However, there is also social drinking in the home environment. People who have dinner
parties or soirees will often serve wine along with the food or snacks in order to lubricate
the evening conversation this is even reflected on television in shows like Channel 4s
DINNER DATE and COME DINE WITH ME. In this environment people are drinking more to
facilitate conviviality and people are less likely to drink to excess although it is not unknown
Reportage Photography Report
Tony Tedham

On the continent social drinking is an established part of life in the family especially in
countries such as Italy and Spain. In this context, all members of the family will partake of
wine (including teenagers) but not to excess because it is about sharing quality time with
each other within the same family and this can take place in the home or even in local cafes
and restaurants where the family in question would usually be known by the proprietors.
In recent years there has been an attempt to this kind of caf culture in Britain but it is
taking time to bed down in a country where people are used to drinking more to relieve
stress and where there is a culture of drinking to excess. However, just this week (April 21
st
-
25
th
2014) there have been news reports that the national crime figures in Britain are down
and the main reason that this is thought to have happened is that people are either not
drinking to excess as much as they used to or because it has become a lot more
unacceptable to engage in violence when drinking: British people are learning to deal with
alcohol more like the Continentals.
In a sensationalist way for example Croydon high street as seen in television programmes
such as channel four Bouncers, Coppers In these programmes you will see people passing
out or falling over one another or fighting fuelled by alcohol. In the news papers we see
celebrities often in bad light with pictures of them of them in a stumbling position.
Sometimes people who had drink alcohol are often portrayed as drunks or alcoholics and
my personal opinion of this is that is a presumption as one person or person who drink
socially might be a bit tipsy not necessarily drunk and out of control. This is because it
creates interest by doing it in a sensationalist way it seem to entertaining as this sells and
attracts readers and viewers making great headlines in the papers and getting a large
number of the members of public reading and watching social drinkers making a fool of
themselves.
Within this new age drinking culture that now exist within young professionals who have the
money to pay for the drinks and also with the increase of woman now drinking in groups
and being known as ladettes as seen in the newstatesmans title The Drunk womans
Manifesto. The Friday nights and weekends can be seen as brawlers weekend as fights
may often occur and not just in the large cites and this makes great news. Even other
European cities or Islands see the British people as having a drinking problem and an impact
on their emergency services, for example on islands like Magaluf, Ibiza, Lanzarote, Mykonos,
and Corfu. Having spoken to Sean Mitchell and asked the question do you fill that British
people have a bad image when abroad he stated yes we are known as not being able to
drink in a civilised way though out the continent.
This creates a stereotype of young students, professional and their drinking habits.
Moderate young drinkers and middle class are not feature but myself I have witness an
impact on medical services and my gather research shows. More than 9 million people in
Reportage Photography Report
Tony Tedham
England drink more than the recommended daily limits. About 15,000 people in England die
from alcohol-related causes each year. About 32% of these deaths are from liver disease.

In terms of binge drinkers overindulging on Britains high streets on a Friday/Saturday night,
the media portray these people as a social menace. Unfortunately, all young people
drinking in certain notorious areas (e.g. Croydon High Street) are labelled as binge drinker
hooligans, or the women as ladettes, whether they are drinking to excess or not. This is
because the media tends to deal with all these kind of issues in a sensationalist way. The
reason for this is because it sells newspapers or generates viewers for TV programmes. If
the media portray these people and issues in an objective, dispassionate way, they would
not generate the desired audience figures. Thus it is in their interest to use not only emotive
language to describe the people they are featuring but also use images which emphasise the
worst possible behaviour and tend to stereotype all the people who just happen to be
drinking in that particular area.
With the problem of the middle classes overindulging in wine in their own homes there is
nothing like the same degree of negative coverage. Indeed, with this issue, which is a
problem in 21
st
century Britain, the media tend to treat the issue as a health problem rather
than a social and behaviour problem. All aspects of the media like newspapers and TV
channels spend a great deal of time analysing their demographic.
The method they use to do this is by having an on-going monitoring programme of samples
of people from all the different socio-economic groups: so various people who represent
groups within our society have special monitors on their TVs which feed back to the media
outlets monitoring organisation exactly what they are watching throughout the course of
the day, seven days a week. The commercial channels will sell advertising space to
businesses who wish to target a particular economic group at a time when they know that
that group is most likely to be watching based on the behaviour of their monitoring control
group.
With non-commercial channels like the BBC, the issue is that they need to show that they
are catering for all parts of the viewing public in order to justify the licence fee. However,
having said this, even the BBC cannot completely escape the prejudices that have been
established in the wider community and will also often report things in a tone and manner
established by the newspapers.
For newspapers it is much easier because they are able to determine how many people are
reading their material from the number of newspaper they sell. But they also use
demographic analysis companies to study the lifestyles and values of those readers, again,
in order to establish the nature of the socio-economic group they are dealing with so they
can present that information to businesses who may advertise in their newspaper.
Reportage Photography Report
Tony Tedham
Popular tabloid newspapers are the worst offenders for stereotyping various groups in
society including social drinkers who are indulging in alcohol in a public area. This is simply
because they need to sell newspapers and an objective rational approach in the text to
their subject will not excite their readers in the same way as an emotive one that is
supported by stereotypical images.
With regard to social drinkers, as we have seen, there is a social distinction made in terms of
their portrayal in the media between young workers and students out at the weekend and
middle-class, 30-somethings drinking at home but there is not a clear distinction made in
terms of gender in relation to this theme. Both men and women are equally negatively
stereotyped by the media for excessive social drinking, although perhaps there is an
element of double-standards in that women are still expected to behave better than men
and their anti-social drunken behaviour will perhaps be targeted through emotive language
and sensationalist images by the press particularly more than men.
Another favourite target of the tabloid newspapers on this theme of excessive social
drinking is in relation to celebrities. In this case it is not so much a question of a specific
social or age group being targeted but rather that the popular media like to show
successful people in unfortunate circumstances. This is a very British phenomenon where
the public like to see leading figures humiliated and the press will cater for this because,
again, it sells newspapers and often they will manipulate an image to claim that such-and-
such a celebrity was practically drunk when in fact the person in question had just
stumbled coming out of a club. This is done by changing a picture or taken in such a way
that it gives an illusion and the using of bold headlines could be tied into the needle theory.
The tendency to portray people in my target group of social drinkers in the way I have
outlines above relates to Audience Theory. It does this in that we can see that the media is
depicting social drinkers in a very specific, stereotypical way because this presentation
reinforces the way the many of the target audience of the media perceive this group.
As media theory is an attempt to draw scientifically-based conclusions about the effect of
the media on groups of people in society. It attempts to achieve scientific objectivity by
being based on a clearly defined social science hypothesis which is then tested against the
empirical findings of factual sociological research
Audience theory, like media theory, is, again, an attempt to draw scientifically-based
conclusions about how media texts influence consumers who are exposed to them. This
theory is also sometimes known ashypodermic needle theory because the theory states
that media text information is so direct and powerful that it is analogous to an injection. As
with media theory, in order to achieve some measure of scientific objectivity, audience
theory focuses on clearly defined sociological categories within the demographic object of
its analysis including class, gender, age, ethnicity and family. It does this because it is
recognised that media does not just communicate with an undifferentiated mass audience
but rather has to speak to all the different subgroups within that broad category.

Reportage Photography Report
Tony Tedham
This group I have decided to focus on are often stereotyped in the sense that they are all
seen in the media quite often as indulging in anti-social behaviour. This generalisation is
unwarranted because people engage in social drinking for many different reasons not
always in order to become inebriated.
The pressures of life can also play a part in people going out for a social drink. We also need
to remember that we as human beings have many occasions to have a social drink e.g.
weddings, christenings and family gatherings which normally always pass without incident.
Football also tends to encourage people to drink in large groups and in the past this was
often associated with hooliganism but in the last 10 years there has not been the barrage of
reporting of football hooliganism that there was in the past and this has created a more
positive atmosphere around football which has meant that there has genuinely been a
decrease of hooliganism and now football fixtures have become more family orientated.
In conclusion, this report has been an interesting experience because it has forced me to
think about how the media portrays certain groups. I have learned that the media,
especially newspapers, prefer to use stereotypical images of various social groups, in the
case of my report, social drinkers, because it has a more sensationalist effect on readers and
in turn sells more newspapers. Because of this tendency to focus on the stereotypical
manifestations of behaviour in a group like social drinkers, the public will often get a
distorted view of society and, in the case of my report, draw the conclusion that almost all
social drinkers are drinking to excess. However, my research on this report has shown that
this conclusion is just not true and in fact many social drinkers are only drinking moderately.
But a factual, objective approach to the subject matter like saying that most social drinking
takes place in the home with a meal and is moderate does not suit the purposes of media
editors and their need for dramatic images.