By now the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words” is a tired cliché, reminiscent of a time when we weren’t being constantly bombarded with images in the media. Nowadays, it would be difficult to go through an entire day without seeing multiple pictures and graphics on television, the Internet, a billboard or a bus. Google reports that the average American sees between 247 and 3,000 advertisements in a 24-hour period. What is often overlooked is that many of the images we see on a daily basis are in fact photographs. But with photographs environmentally omnipotent, are they still an influential medium of communication? Have photographs lost their power to affect us?

Photography and photojournalism have changed drastically in the last century or so, and mass media has had a huge impact on these two fields. But one individual has seen the spectrum. And that man, one of Canada’s most distinguished photojournalists, also happens to reside in Victoria.

Stories from a living room

Ted Grant has been taking photographs for nearly 60 years and has covered everything from the summer Olympic Games in Montreal to child victims of the nuclear reactor explosion at Chernobyl. He is renowned for his ability to capture the raw, uninhibited emotions of his subjects — a capacity which few photojournalists are blessed with.

“These days, you watch the news and see scenes of horror in Baghdad and, suddenly, those pictures are gone and it’s a beach scene of people swimming around with the dolphins,” says Grant about the differences between still photography and film. “The moment of disaster is over in two or three eye flicks.”

Yet with still photography, one is able to capture a moment of reality — stopping time for one one-hundredth of a second. Some pictures depict scenes of incredible emotion, such as Alfred Eisenstaedt’s “V-J Day in Times Square,” which captures a passionate kiss between an American soldier and a young nurse shortly after the Japanese surrendered to the U.S. in 1945. Likewise, the macabre photograph of a crying, naked Vietnamese girl running down the street after a being burned by a napalm explosion taken by Nick Ut epitomized the horrors of modern warfare and triggered international condemnation of the U.S. intervention in Vietnam.

As a photojournalist veteran of the both the Vietnam War and the Arab-Israeli Six Day War, Grant recalls what it was like to shoot in a war zone.

“[It] scared the hell out of me most of the time. You’re scared because the only thing you’ve got to shoot back with is a camera. You’re not really thinking about what’s going on because you’re trying to photograph what’s going on,” he says.

A photojournalist’s moral imperative

According to Grant, the photojournalist differs from the commercial photographer because the primary objective of the photojournalist is to tell a story. Was it ever difficult for Grant to merely observe certain situations and not get emotionally involved? At times, yes.

“I’ve lived the picture taking, I had become totally involved in what was going on, so I lived the moment and I captured the moment,” he says.

For that reason, Grant was deeply affected by his experiences with the Chernobyl children. He explains one particularly difficult moment when he photographed a nurse holding a small child in her arms.

“I lose it every time I try to explain [it] to somebody without them even looking at the picture. The picture is gorgeous. It’s a simple female doctor holding a child’s hand, and all you see is the stethoscope, the breast, the child’s hands ... and as I took that picture, the kid died.”

Naturally, Grant feels strongly about the politics of nuclear weapons in today’s world.

“I look at [the children] and then I hear about the president of Iran talking about obliterating Israel, or doing whatever it is with nuclear weapons and things like that; it’s beyond me. It’s beyond me that a human being would even consider atomic warfare,” he says.

Certainly, still photography has revolutionized how we interpret contemporary history. Photographs allow us to glimpse into the past, to look back at a moment in time and to relive the events and emotions of a situation that has been captured in that fraction of a second. What has changed, however, is the manner in which photographs are being used in the public sphere.

You have a friend request from Ted

Social networking sites such as Facebook allow users to upload hundreds of images, making friends, family, co-workers and potential employers privy to an individual’s various endeavors. At 80 years of age, Grant uses his Facebook account to connect with his grandchildren, despite having a limited knowledge of exactly how it works and often needing “coaching” on how to open and reply to messages. But he definitely understands the impact Facebook has already had on our society, and cautions our generation against its adverse effects.

“It may be all fun, and everyone is having a great time at the party on Saturday night. They’ve got their cell phones and they’re taking pictures of each other, and some are rather embarrassing one might say, and that gets onto Facebook. Now that same person, five years later is going to run for parliament. And all of a sudden, oops! There’s that picture, still hanging around on Facebook, [with] that person doing naughty things and their whole career is totally destroyed. It’s one of the dangers of a site like that.”

Social voyeurism, where images are collected and displayed en masse and virtually anyone is able to peer into one’s life, has become a dangerous new trend, according to Grant. What’s more, Facebook has the right to keep your photographs on file — even if you delete them off the site.

The dark doom is a silent room

The effect of photographs on modern society has also changed as a result of innovations in photographic technology itself. Photographers are no longer governed by a finite number of exposures. Digital cameras allow for hundreds of pictures to be taken on a single card, which can easily be transferred to a computer or a website. In some ways, the ability to take hundreds of pictures at a time has diminished the artistic, creative brilliance of the art photography.

According to Grant, this picture-taking zeal has led to a “deterioration of photography,” because anyone and everyone can hold up a digital camera and click.

“With me, my picture taking has always been by my gut, by my feeling, motivated by the light and the content,” he says. “Digital, for all of its beautiful aspects, tends to make us frivolous photographers.”

Nonetheless, Grant maintains that digital technology has transformed nature photography, and laments that it was invented “30 years too late.”

Citizen journalism and cell phone cameras

Cell phones have also contributed to the effect of images in the mass media. A few years ago, cell phone cameras were simply non-existent. But within a short time period, the technologically-advanced camera phone has trumped the traditional cell phone.

Camera phones have contributed an interesting role in citizen photojournalism. Cell phones are used by people in virtually every country in the world, empowering ordinary citizens to record anything at anytime. Frequently, professional newspaper crews, journalists and photographers are prohibited from certain events — be they religious, cultural, social or political. But cell phones with built-in cameras are omnipresent, fitting inconspicuously in one’s pocket or purse, and are available in an instant to photograph and record any situation.

For example, though the execution of Saddam Hussein by hanging was publicly announced and scheduled, it was not officially filmed or recorded for a variety of political and ethical reasons. But within hours of his death, a morbid video of the execution recorded illicitly with a cell phone was leaked to the press.

In a similar vein, cell phone cameras are becoming useful tools of resistance in countries embroiled in political and social turmoil. In the Burmese protests of 2007, cell phones played an integral role. The Saffron Revolution, as it was later known, was a mass uprising of monks, students and political activists who took to the streets protesting the ruling military junta and its economic policies. The government responded by blacking out Internet access to the entire nation, thus preventing images and reports from reaching the outside world. But the protesters were able to use cell phone cameras to capture violent images of government repression and inform the international community of their plight.

Don’t forget – someone took that photo

In many ways, the advances in photographic technology have opened doors to professional photographers and citizen picture-takers alike. Digital cameras as well as cell phone cameras have transcended political and social boundaries, empowering people all over the world to take pictures at any time, in any place. This fact alone attests to the enduring power of photographs and to the future of photojournalism.

But it is also necessary to consider the negative aspects of the relationship between photographs, technology and mass media. An individual’s privacy is more likely to be invaded thanks to new technologies — not only through social networking sites, but also by state security apparatuses. In this context, photographs are arguably more powerful in today’s society than they were in generations past.

While the true power of photographs and images is wholly immeasurable, it is important to be conscious of the images we see every day and think about how they impact not only ourselves, but also the world.

Today, we are exposed to so many millions of photographs that to generate a thousand words describing each would take a lifetime. But from time to time, it’s good to sit down and contemplate the contours of a single photograph.

“Human beings are so unpredictable,” says Grant. “You never know what they’re going to do. You let them do their own thing. I just think rocks and things and peeling paint it not my thing.”