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Pictorial sounds like such a pleasant word. The word must be about pleasant pictures. Sure enough, it is, most of the time.

Our tendency is to define types of pictures into categories, mostly so we can enter images that match those descriptions in contest categories, from whence the definitions come. I wonder how many readers see a picture and say, “Boy, that was one sweet pictorial in today’s paper. It was so much better than the spot news photo and there wasn’t squat for feature pictures today. I can’t wait for tomorrow’s pictorial and I sure hope they have a feature picture story.”

What is a Pictorial?
So, the traditional definition goes something like: An image that conveys a purely graphic rendering of a setting. Or, an image where the graphic qualities of the picture dominate. Such photos usually don’t have recognizable people. They’re often of rural settings: a horse set against a pattern of fences (preferably in snow), patterns of birds or some other animal against a land mass or, the ever popular mass of cross country skiers. They are generally eye candy with little value beyond their graphic quality, often made because in a newspaper setting there’s a demand for something to fill tomorrow’s metro front.

The Two Types
Pictorial photos do tend to fall into two types and depending on who is judging them, one or the other will be valued more.

Type 1: Those that are purely graphic and don’t have much quality beyond their graphicness.
Type 2: Those that use strong composition, light, color and moment to make a statement about a setting. The latter group of images elicit a dimensional response from those who look at them, the former are usually just pretty.

There is nothing wrong with pretty pictures. And, I believe that every image in a journalistic environment should do more than one thing. Too often photos exist in published form only to prove a point that a written story makes or only because they show evidence that something happened, or because they are only pretty. This is yin without yang.

Pictorials: An Exercise
Imagine the difference if we instead expected images to elicit a more dimensional response, to do at least two things, to engage viewers on more than one level.

How do you do that with pictorials? Do this exercise: go through several years of POYi pictorial winners and decide which of the winning images fall into Type 1 or Type 2 as described above.

Ask whether you could come back to an image tomorrow and see something you didn’t today. When you first see the image, does it engage you beyond the surface graphic qualities? Does it speak to a wider aspect of life on the planet? Is their meaning, or substance, beyond the graphics?

The essential question - whether it’s a pictorial or some other “category” of photograph - is whether there was a perception conveyed by the photographer that goes beyond successfully pointing the camera at something.

What do you think?