If you’ve seen the Pixar movie “Up” you’ll get that reference.

Last week I told you that someone told me that someone had told them that “reportage is the new spot colour” and I said I’d discuss it this week after we’d all ruminated on it.

Objection! Hearsay! Calls for speculation! (anyone else obsessively watching the Depp vs Heard trial?!)

Where do I begin to deconstruct that… Reportage is the new spot colour?! Let me tell you what I think they meant, and why it’s not as preposterous as it sounds. Even though it is utterly preposterous…

I’ve been shooting for 13 years. When I started out, “reportage” was what the old people in the industry did. It definitely wasn’t cool. It wasn’t remotely fashionable. And besides that nobody really knew how to spell or pronounce it.

Over the years, thanks to sites like Moment Junkie, Fearless Photographers and This is Reportage, a new breed of reportage was born. It was cooler to call it “moment photography” or “documentary” or “creative documentary” for a bit until This is Reportage was born, and made the actual word “reportage” cool.

TiR especially has been a runaway success (rightly so, who doesn’t love Alan Law) since its inception and because of that success and popularity, more and more people have flocked to it, and to the reportage word and style. “Reportage” is the new “unobtrusive”.

Yeah, I said style… I knew you’d pick up on that. Back in my early days, reportage was just a technique. It was “the stuff you had to do when you weren’t taking portraits or group photos”. Now reportage is viewed more as a style and a trend of wedding photography especially and I think this is where this ‘reportage is the new spot colour’ comes from.

Spot colour was a style and a trend too. Because digital was the new normal and we had photoshop… I wanted to dig out a photo I made where the whole thing except a pair of superman socks was black and white, but I couldn’t be bothered going into the loft for my archive drives. You can imagine it though. I taught Banksy everything he knows.

We all flocked to spot colour, well most of us who wanted to be ‘cutting edge’ did, because it was the trend.

When Fearless was at the peak of its powers, it championed tiny silhouettes, couples in dangerous landscapes, small people in big places… Fearless became a style, people flocked to it. It was the in thing.

And right now, reportage is the in thing, so people are flocking to it.

Again, not a bad thing at all. Great reportage photography is mind-blowing.

But…

When people flock to something en masse there’s almost always a deliberate rebellious movement away from that popular so-called-mainstream style. I think that’s the only reason for this apparent ‘reportage is the new spot colour’ opinion beginning to rumble amongst the rebel forces of the wedding photography industry.

The continuation of that ‘quote’ was that ‘Apparently reportage is the new spot colour… a classic portrait is what’s hot right now’.

Obviously I don’t think reportage as a centuries old technique of photography can be compared to a photoshop fad like spot colour. But you can’t argue with the style/trend cycle and almost certainly with a mass move towards reportage that’s happened in the last few years, we will see the industry at some point start to move onto the next ‘new thing’. But reportage won’t go away like spot colour did… although I bet there are plenty of people around still rocking spot colour and making a living from it!

So the next big thing could be classic portraiture, could be editorial, could be digital art like spot colour or textures! Who knows! I’m sure we’ll all flock there when it becomes clear (at which point it’s too late).

Two weddings and a pre-shoot for me this weekend. Lots of driving. Whatever you’re doing and wherever you’re doing it, have a great one.

Thanks for reading, happy clicking!

Adam