ABSTRACT

This chapter considers the various aesthetic strategies deployed by photojournalists and their impact on the ethics of the practice as well as on its storytelling function. In more recent times, aesthetics came to be defined on a more abstracted level extending beyond the visual arts, referring to the quality of feeling or sensory experience that an object or text evokes. Postmodern aesthetic theory has at times been preoccupied with a rejection of the close traditional relationship between art and beauty, recognizing that the role of art is to disrupt and agitate rather than to appease our sense of order with objects that are 'aesthetically pleasing'. The photographer who is perhaps cited more often than any other in discussions about the 'aestheticization of suffering' is Sebastiao Salgado. Salgado is a prolific and celebrated Brazilian photographer who has spent his career capturing great heights of beauty and depths of human suffering the world over.