Reportage

I almost always find my favourite photos and my favourite photographers come from the world of essay or journalistic reportage. The ones who approach the world like an observer destabilised by the emotion, events and impulses that pass before their lens are the ones who most directly affect me. The ones who make images of the world that, to abuse Ezra Pound's words on poetry, are "news that stays news". But there is also something to be said for those photographers who exist on the front line, who document those moments that must be seen, must be preserved and must be remembered. The series of images of this kind that never fails to move me is the work done by photographer Charles Moore during the civil rights movement in the deep south of the USA, particularly in Montgomery and Birmingham. His images are justly famous, but viewed as montage rather than in isolation, they embody a force and fury that is impossible to evade.