In A Criticism Of Photography Inadequately Representing The Theme, Oregon Images Are The Exception

In a criticism of the failure of recent news photography to fully capture the reality of human suffering under the high temperatures of the recent “heat dome”, some Oregon photographers stood out as good examples. Michael Shaw’s opinion piece in the Columbia Journal of Photography, “The Visual Failings of the Heat Dome Coverage is available for reading here.

Mr. Shaw noted too many photographs showed banal, stock-photography style images—such as close-ups of thermometer readings—or matched photos of children happily playing in water with text that described the hundreds of deaths and thousands of emergency-room visits that occurred. Reuters published a 29 image slideshow in which only four photos from Oregon photographers gave any indication that the situation was a crisis.

In Krakow, a water curtain protects tourists from excessive heat, by Silar, 2015 CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons. (Illustration not part of the above-mentioned discussion.)