This Web page is destined for Mexican photographer Pedro Meyer's Web site ZoneZero/One where photographers discuss issues relating to the impact of digital imaging on photography.

It is the work of English documentary photographer Daniel Meadows, Photojournalism Tutor at the Centre for Journalism Studies, University of Wales, Cardiff, UK. E-mail:100270.2244@compuserve.com

Other Web sites of interest to photojournalists can be found through Yahoo and include...

Alfred Eisenstaedt

The Photojournalist's Coffee House

Time/Life Photo Gallery

John Vink's Cultural Heights

In the early 1970s, travelling in a converted double-decker bus which doubled as home and photo-gallery, Meadows criss-crossed England making pictures of the "ordinary British". His article is titled:

Digital Double-Decker

When reportage photographers play in the digital sand pit groping for the meaning of their medium in the electronic age, it is important that they do not lose sight of photography's unique powers of description. Although photographs have no hold on objective truth, it is important that those who make photographs are mindful of that which is truthFUL in their work. For the energy with which a picture is charged is something which lives independently of the photographer who created it. That which we call the "frisson of the authentic", that dimension of the picture which "touches" the viewer, also belongs to and, more importantly, has the power to affect deeply the lives of those who are represented in photographs, as can be seen by what follows.

Here are two pictures taken in the northern UK coastal town of Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria. The first was taken in October 1974 and the second, twenty one years later, in July 1995. The subject is the same: five people who, in 1974, called themselves "boot boys". They were fifteen years old and in their final year at school. A year later they became apprenticed tradesmen; four of them at Vickers Engineering (where the British nuclear deterrent is made - Polaris then, Trident now) and the fifth, Brian Morgan (the tall lad on the left) at North West Gas.

I decided to re-photograph them in 1995 because I was curious to find out what had become of them. I was thinking of the passage of time, how things have changed in twenty-one years: the fashions, the employment situation, the end of the cold war, all that. And, I am afraid to say, when I persuaded the local newspaper in Barrow, the Evening Mail, to help me trace them by publishing the picture large across its centre spread, I gave little thought to how the lads might react to being contacted again.

I report here, in their own words, the reactions of the men to the original picture when, without warning, it dropped into their lives. They are, left to right: Brian Morgan, Martin Tebay, Paul McMillan, Phil Tickle and Mike Comish.

Brian Morgan

I'd nipped home on the Wednesday afternoon and my girlfriend said: "Sit down I've got something to tell you" And I thought it was something really serious (laughs), which it turned out to be. Her hairdresser had phoned her up saying: "Go and buy an Evening Mail and open the middle pages." And that's what was produced on my lap. A photograph from twenty-one years ago. And then the phone started ringing. I was in too much of a state of shock to answer it. But the next day was the worst. Just like the other lads in the photograph… the amount of stick that they got, and sarcasm, it was unreal. Suicidal. I thought I'd go to work early to get away from everybody before they turned up. But they had the same idea, and turned up at the same time. So I took it like a true man and went out to do my job and tried to forget about it. But I couldn't because everywhere I went people had made photocopies of the picture. Enlargements. Every cupboard door, and locker door, every drinks machine you went to there was a photocopy on it, and sarcastic comments underneath.

Martin Tebay

A lot of lads the same age as me who see that photograph now, are jealous of the picture and wish that they'd had their photograph taken around that time because it is just exactly as it was. That's as it was in 1974. And a lot of lads aged 14 or 15 don't often get photographs taken like that. You know, when they're young children - eight, nine and ten - their parents take a lot, but as you get older you don't gang around with your mum and dad, you want to go somewhere on your own and you don't get so many photographs taken.

Paul McMillan

I was in Lanzarotti on holiday when it was printed in the Evening Mail. I found out at Manchester airport when I landed. My mate's wife picked us up and I was putting my suitcases in the back of her car and she turned round and said: "There was a picture of you in the Evening Mail about two weeks ago." And I thought it might have had something to do with mini rugby which I was involved with. And I said: "What was it?" And she said: "Oh it was you and four of your friends." And as soon as she said "four of your friends" I knew which ones she was talking about. And it all came back. My mother's got the original picture in an album.

Phil Tickle

The first thing I knew about the photograph was when I opened the Mail. My partner Karen, she works in the Evening Mail and you'd have thought she'd have warned me, wouldn't you? And I was reading through and I turned to the centre pages and God! I nearly choked! I mean the first thing I thought was: "They can't do that without asking your permission!" Surely not! Luckily, when I looked at it, I saw I was right in the crease and I thought perhaps people wouldn't look. So I shouted to Karen and I said: "What's this in here?" And she said "What?" She hadn't recognised me! So I thought, it's not so bad, if she didn't recognise me no one will. Plus I've had a moustache all my adult life until about four months ago when I shaved it off, so I thought: that picture of me without a moustache… no one will recognise me. So I went to work the next morning, and before I'd got there they'd been round, and there were photocopies stuck up all over the place. How they recognised me I don't know. I could hardly recognise myself!

Mike Comish

(of the 1974 picture...) You'd taken another picture of me earlier that day. And I met these lads and told them to come and get their photograph taken. And when you gave the photographs to us you wouldn't give me one. You said: "You've already had a free one, so sod off." And I didn't get one. So the first time I saw it was when it was printed in the Evening Mail the other week. I had a phone call on the way home (he is a British Telecom engineer and carries a portable telephone) and my wife had the paper and told me. Luckily I wasn't in work, I'm on the sick. I had a dislocated elbow playing football, so I've had a couple of phone calls but I haven't actually seen the photocopies. That's yet to come.

These testimonies serve to confirm what all photographers already know in their hearts - but sometimes choose to ignore - about the veracity and impact of the documentary photograph. The "boot boys" were recognised not just by their families and friends but also by their workmates and acquaintances. Publication of the picture altered the quality of their lives for many days and in many ways. Don't tell these lads that reportage is dead. They know only too well how it lives.

It is clear that, had I deliberately misrepresented these men by using the seamless montage afforded us by computers to add information to the picture (a mutilated domestic cat, say, swinging by its tail from a waistband; a meat cleaver placed in a hand; some splatters of blood on clothing), then the damage caused in this small community to each of them would have been considerable.

Wide appreciation of the seamless artifice enabled by digital imaging techniques creates many problems for the documentary photographer, but none is greater than the need to be truthful. As Lewis Hine, the great American photographer and campaigner said all those years ago:

"You and I know that this undoubted faith in the integrity of the photograph is often rudely shaken; for while photographs may not lie, liars may photograph. It becomes necessary, then, in our revelation of the truth, to see to it that the camera we depend on contracts no bad habits."

Daniel Meadows, Centre for Journalism Studies, University of Wales, Cardiff, UK. E-mail:100270.2244@compuserve.com