It is too simple to say that the idea behind photojournalism is the practice of replacing words with photographs, using a visual aesthetic medium to be the sole witness to an event. Whether it is through words or through the lens of a photograph, an event, a slice of life is interpreted through a separate medium and thus given meaning. Thus to say that any photography or article is wholly objective is to speak of something that does not exist. Photographs are in many ways about the assignment of meaning, whether it is social, political, economic, or personal. And every set of eyes that rest upon the photograph redesign the image with their own unique flavor of subjectivity, drawn from past experiences and from their own separate reality.

But why photographs? What distinct advantage do photographs have over words?

To many the camera seems like a passive machine. Like the nature of a pen, the camera itself lacks a voice – the voice comes from the artist, the journalist, the photographer. What a photograph can do, however, is capture every minute detail eternally. Writing, journalism in that form, denotes a world bound to rationality and order. Grammar, sentences, paragraphs, all flow as a cohesive coherent whole and thus even visually have a pattern that cannot be broken. If the words were to be read out of order, the words would make no sense. The words are unable to exist independently of one another and interpreted as singular objects. (Rothstein)

Paradoxically, while a photograph seems bound to the white borders of its frame, the visual interpretation is endless. Is it a three dimensional world broken down and flattened into a two dimensional one. Analogously, our five senses are reduced to the single one of sight, as Susan Sontag points out in her analysis of photography. With writing there is a notable beginning and end – an introduction and a conclusion. Photographs remain open ended, and it is their fragmentary nature that differentiates them.

Photographs seem factual in nature as they are a direct reflection of the events that have taken place. But whether they adequately depict the tragedy that they speak of in times of war is another matter altogether. It has captured a moment that existed, but yet can never exist again. (Moeller)

“So a word of caution: words can help us understand the true meaning of a photograph, but they can also curtail meaning .We should be wary of two types of half-truth: the tendency of the external world duplicated in a photograph to disguise the human meaning of things and events, and the tendency of words to rob photographs of their resonances and beauty by focusing on who, what, when, and where.”