The image has become famous: the young glamorous Lebanese, mobile phone camera in hands and handkerchiefs to their noses, driving their red convertible through a bombed-out neighbourhood in southern Beirut, the rubble reflected in their mirrored sunglasses. Spencer Platt, the photographer who took the picture, saw the image in a split second and snapped it before the car carried its occupants away.

Months later, that snatched image was selected by a jury in Amsterdam last weekend as the World Press Photo of the Year, the top prize in the annual awards for the photojournalistic tribe who roam around the world on our behalf, often risking their lives, to bring us images of war and disaster. It was chosen, the judges said, precisely because it did not look like other pictures. “It’s a unique picture of war,” Platt explains. “It shows that life can go on being sexy and beautiful even in the midst of a war.”

Others disagreed. The Lebanese photographer Samer Mohdad described the jury’s choice as “an insult to all news photographers who have risked their lives to cover this horrible war”. Why had this one been chosen, he asked, and not for example, a photograph of a dead child being carried from the rubble at Qana?

The five young subjects themselves, far from being wealthy war tourists, were simply returning to check on their own bombed neighbourhood. They learnt of the photograph from the internet and got their right to reply through other journalists.

But the controversy stirred by the picture strikes at the heart of the some of the most pressing issues facing photojournalism today. Much has been said in the past several decades about the passing of a golden age in photojournalism, when hard-hitting documentary work graced the pages of publications such as Life magazine. Competition from television was blamed, then the passing of publications from the great publishing dynasties into the hands of business-minded share- holders. Now the internet is being eyed up as the next great challenge — or opportunity — that will determine the future of photojournalism.

Once upon a time, the subjects of a picture such as Platt’s would not have become aware of their notoriety. Now, through the globalising effect of the internet, the war photographer, like the local newspaper man, can be held to account, as Platt was when his subjects hit back in interviews with other journal- ists. Platt’s employer is Getty, one of the big wire-service agencies that provide the bulk of images to news organisations around the world. Platt blames part of the controversy on one publication that captioned the picture with the phrase “war tourists”, a loaded term he did not use when he filed the picture. With mass distribution, context and nuance can be lost and a spin the photographer never intended added.

Right in the centre of his winning picture is the object that is perhaps stirring up the photojournalistic community the most: the mobile-phone camera, turning every owner into a potential photojournalist, recording images as they happen, with no delay for the man from Magnum to fly in. Whether you view this development as a threat or a boon depends very much on your views on the nature and purpose of photojournalism.

“I don’t think I speak for most photographers but I don’t give a s***, I’m all for democratisation,” says Chris-topher Anderson, of the Magnum agency. “In some ways, it places more value on what I call a sense of ownership and a point of view.” He cites the Tube passengers’ grainy images of the London bombings as one of the best examples of images that would simply not have existed if professionals were the only ones holding the camera.

Jan Grarup, a renowned Danish war photographer, agrees. “Some of the pictures are outstanding, I couldn’t do better myself. Even being there doesn’t make my pictures better. His or hers might be more authentic. It doesn’t matter if they are blurred.”

Grarup, of course, spends most of his time in places where there aren’t mobile-phone cameras and they would not be of much use anyway. “What are you going to do with a camera phone in Darfur unless you’re holding it when the Janjawid attack?” His mission, like that of most of the photojournalistic elite who gathered in Amsterdam, is documentary photography. They spend sometimes months in the darker places on earth to record unfolding horrors.

While conflicts such as the one in Lebanon — relatively accessible and right in the headlines — provided a welter of images, both professional and amateur, far fewer emerge depicting the horrors of places such as Darfur and Rwanda. Grarup’s unforgiving black and white photos may make for uncomfortable viewing but they are necessary postcards from Hell.

Perhaps the most glaring omission from the winning entries, and the presentations put on by the photographers, are images from Iraq, the defining war of this generation. The danger of working there has stopped almost all nonArab photographers from going, and Iraqi photographers, most still learning the protocols and art of photojournalism, are the ones providing the bulk of the images we see. Has that left any gap in our understanding of the war? “Never before have we seen so much imagery from a war but known so little about it,” Anderson says.

The Vietnam War provided so many of the images that entered our cultural psyche but few icons from Iraq stand out. Perhaps the most famous may be the photographs from Abu Ghraib, taken not by photojournalists but by soldiers.

But ultimately the future of photojournalism rests on the visceral power of the still image. The widespread use of mobile-phone cameras, to Grarup, signifies a continuing interest in photography that is crucial to his professional survival. If publishers are less willing to shell out the money for world-class photography, others are harnessing its power for different ends. Many of the world’s top photographers now work on assignments for aid organisations, a move that would once have been seen as “crossing the line” from journalism.

Aid agencies recognise the unique power of the image to move and are hiring the best to do so. Don McCullin, the veteran British war photographer, has just returned from a trip to Chad and Darfur for Oxfam, as has Ron Haviv, of VII, for Unicef. For Paolo Pellegrin, of Magnum, regular assignments for Médecins sans Frontiãres provide an outlet free from commercial pressures.

Others, such as Grarup, are choosing to embrace the internet to do things with photographs that were not possible before. When he published his book Shadowland last year, a website was created from which people could download images complete with audio of Grarup discussing the photographs. Other newspapers and magazines, similarly, have developed multimedia presentations to accompany pictures, competing with video in an evolving online world.

These developments are anathema to the purists. But for the photojournalists, the most important thing is to be heard. “We could just retreat to our galleries but the audience you reach there are those who are interested anyway,” Grarup says. “Our challenge is to reach out to the world.”

Pellegrin, too, remains up-beat. “We are in a moment of transition, it’s true,” he says. “But important stories always engage photographers and they will always be recognised, even if the medium is changing. I’m not at all pessimistic. Photojournalism is still very much alive and a voice in our world.”

The World Press Photo exhibition runs at Oude Kerk, Amsterdam, until June 17 before going on tour. It will run at the Royal Festival Hall in London from Aug 18 to Sept 9 (www.worldpressphoto.org)

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