© Nir Elias/Reuters
April 2008
Ayperi Karabuda Ecer: Memory of the Present
“News is life, and life is news,” says Ayperi Karabuda Ecer. The statement felt particularly apt. Just minutes before I met the Reuters vice president picture business development deep inside the agency’s monolithic headquarters in central Paris, a bomb had exploded in a nearby building.
Her take on the likely media coverage of the incident revealed just how she thinks news photography and news generally has changed in recent years. “Everybody will know about the bomb in five minutes and the picture will be online,” she explains. “Coverage by newspaper will be more comment based: ‘where terrorism is going, etc’. Newspapers have become more like magazines giving more of a context to what happens.”
We met ahead of the release of ‘Our World Now’, the latest Reuters book to be published with Thames & Hudson, and the first of what will be a yearly document of the world seen through the eyes of the 600 photographers that contribute to the agencies half a million-strong distribution of images each year. For ‘Our World Now’, Karabuda Ecer and her magazine desk team edited hundreds of thousands of images, choosing 350 to appear in the book.
Reuters is renowned for its news coverage and the speed of its service, but Karabuda Ecer and her team are dedicated to adding value to daily news images. When joining Reuters in 2003, after 12 years as editor-in-chief across the city of Paris at Magnum Photos, she was asked to develop the content, and the “perception of the content”, of the agency’s news photography. Breaking news has always been, and will still continue to be, the primary business of Reuters, she insists, but in recent years the market has started to demand something different. “News used to be much more events-related, and people are now more visually literate,” she says. “Twenty years ago you could have a picture of a handshake and it would be a symbol of ‘peace’ or ‘agreement’. Today, you have to appeal to people’s emotions, so now you would have a fantastic image of something in a conflict zone that gives you that message. We are now asking questions such as, ‘where is Iraq heading?’ and ‘where is the US heading?’ rather than just reporting what’s happening.”
© Goran Tomasevic/Reuters.
US soldiers push the car of an Iraqi man to start the engine at a checkpoint in north Baghdad, 13 June 2007.
“It’s the kind of image you can put anywhere and people will react to it,” says Karabuda Ecer.
Karabuda Ecer’s experience at Magnum, where she found herself drawn towards news photography, has heavily informed her current role, part of which is to inspire Reuters photographers to “go further”. “By showing images that are not obviously or directly ‘newsy’ you can still say a lot about society and have them published in larger markets,” she says. “So the images will not just appear on the front page but also, for example, in the travel section or women’s pages.”
© Steve Crisp/Reuters.
Heavy fog rolls by early in the morning near the Dubai Marina, United Arab Emirates, 21 November 2007. This was one of Reuters biggest-selling images in 2007.
“It shows that pictures that are not pure news pictures are becoming more important for us, and follow trends, in this case about the environment and climate, and places where there is a new economy,” says Karabuda Ecer.
The general quality of news photography used has also improved because of the speed and availability of distribution, and simply because of the growing ability of photographers themselves. “In Indian papers there are Indian photographers shooting front-page images,” she says. “You would rarely have seen that in the past because they simply didn’t exist.”
© Nacho Doce/Reuters.
Kate McCann, mother of missing four-year-old British girl Madeleine McCann, holds a soft toy in her hand as shadow silhouettes of her and her husband Gerry are seen on a wall, 17 May 2007, Lagos, Portugal.
“One the big problems for photographers is when a story [like that of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann] goes on and on – what do you shoot? This is a very good example of giving a different angle,” says Karabuda Ecer.
Reuters insists that the publishing of ‘Our World Now’, and the first two books with Thames & Hudson, ‘The State of the World’ (2006) and ‘Sport in the 21st Century’ (2007) – all of which were made up of images shot exclusively on Canon cameras – has given thousands of news images “a second life”. The books have also given hundreds of often little known professional news photographers, working in sometimes remote areas of the world, a sense of being part of a wider purpose: the documenting our world today. “They are a tribute to our photographers who shoot every day,” says Karabuda Ecer.
