Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen

Fred Ritchin has spent four decades thinking and writing about photography's relationship to truth, journalism, and social change, and Bending the Frame is his most sustained account of what happens to documentary photography in a networked, digital world. The book examines how the tools and ethics of photojournalism are being remade by smartphones, social media, open-source image distribution, and the collapse of the traditional editorial hierarchy that once governed how news photographs were made and seen. Ritchin is interested in both the risks of that collapse and its possibilities, particularly the emergence of what he calls the citizen journalist.

The argument draws on a wide range of photographers and image-makers working at the intersection of documentary, advocacy, and art, including Sebastiao Salgado, Eugene Richards, and Susan Meiselas. Ritchin writes as a former picture editor at the New York Times Magazine and a longtime educator at NYU's International Center of Photography, and the book is grounded throughout in practical and ethical questions rather than pure theory. A standard reference in photojournalism and documentary studies programs.