N E W S L E T T E R

# 0 6  H E L L O  A G A I N

(see previous newsletters here)

t o p i c s  o f  t h i s  n e w s l e t t e r :

• W o r k p l a c e  D e a t h s

• ( P e r s o n a l )  H i k i n g  S e a s o n  O p e n e d

• S t a t e  o f  t h e  I n d u s t r y  ( i n  I t a l y )

W O R K P L A C E   D E A T H S  —  C A R M E N

I first saw Carmen at a protest against the workplace deaths. She lost her partner and the father of their two children almost two years ago; Angelo died after never waking up from a seven month coma caused by a workplace accident. Last year in Italy, there were at least 3 persons a day who died due to a workplace accident.
I've been following Carmen in her current life as she tries to adjust to the situation and come to terms with the loss of Angelo; she still misses him terribly, but she says that "at least I don't wake up anymore with the thought 'he's gone'". At the same time, she's notwithstanding the pain also slowly finding the strength to engage in activism hoping to prevent future workplace deaths.

Additional (photo)work-related detail to this: after pitching this unsuccessfully to some Italian photo editors (to those who did reply: thank you, always so appreciated!), I decided to propose this to an Italian writer, thinking of an Italian daily he works with. He decided to offer the story to an Italian weekly that ran it. Both the writer and the magazine then posted about the story in social media with no mention of me in any way—so out of respect for their decision to keep me out of this I won't mention them either.* Yes, this tells about the state of photojournalism in Italy today—more about this further below, in case you're interested.

*To be honest, I was a quite disappointed about the article, and I didn't like how the photos were handled.

T H I S  Y E A R ' S  F I R S T  H I K E

My personal 2022 hiking season opened in late February. The winter was basically rainless, so consequently it also meant snowless in many places, as you can see from the landscape. While it was a lovely day out, we exaggerated a bit: 25 km (15.5 miles), approximately 8h of walking in total, with lots of ups and downs... The highest point was 1,436 m (4,711 ft), Monte Palanzone.

P H O T O J O U R N A L I S M  I N  I T A L Y

(or rather, lack thereof)

Some time ago, I wrote a sort of an "open letter" on LinkedIn directed to some of the actors in the Italian photography and editorial world. My issue is that I feel that an active, curated visual journalism in Italian newspapers is nowadays basically extinct; as far as I know, there isn't a single Italian newspaper that has staff photographers, and the newspapers don't even hire freelancers for interviews/stories, or buy images directly from them—the newspapers basically only license images from agencies. And actually, apparently many don't have photo editors either, commissioning or otherwise.

In my post I tried to ask if I'm missing something—but I also asked why photojournalism isn't valued even that little bit that the name of the photographers would be published next to the images purchased from an agency (sometimes the photographer's name is there, but most often not). Photojournalism just doesn't seem to be considered an integral and relevant part of journalism; something that completes and supports and brings value to journalism—something that, in short, is journalism too.

The principal goal of that post was to spark a some kind of (national) industry-wide conversation about it, but also of course to see a change, preferably soon, but neither has happened yet... If anyone has any ideas how to make Italian newspapers interested in photojournalism and make them take it seriously, I'm all eyes and ears!

(I also wish that one day I'd see in Italy something so active and supportive like NPPA in the US but that's yet another conversation...)

Let's be in touch soon! A presto! Ollaan pian yhteydessä!