Looking at New York Times photographer Damon Winter’s photo series, A Grunt’s Life – which won the third place award in the Pictures of the Year International features contest – Paul Hoffman asks whether the style of the photography compromises the objectivity of the images as war documentary.
Does the old school, discolored, oversaturated, plastic toy camera feel of the photographs, which was created through the Hipstamatic app on Winter’s iPhone, detract from their validity?
Several critics argue “yes”. According to their perspective, the overtly artistic nature of this series pushes the photographs out of the objective realm of “photojournalism” and into the subjective realm of “photography”…