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One of the 28 members of the Chicago Sun-Times photography staff now without a job, Rob Hart is cataloguing his experience via Tumblr. Hart used his iPhone to capture this screenshot of a photo of he and his wife taken by Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist John J. Kim for the Chicago Tribune.
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The name of Rob Hart’s Tumblr site says it all. “Laid off from the Sun-Times” is the former Chicago Sun-Times staff photographer’s platform for sharing his experience since the newspaper cut its entire 28-person photography staff. The blog’s description also gets right to the point: “Rob Hart was replaced with a reporter with an iPhone, so he is documenting his new life with an iPhone, but with the eye of a photojournalist trained in storytelling.”
Hart has been posting images that document his life since the layoffs were announced, from the beer he drank at a tavern nearby the newspaper offices an hour afterward to the makeshift home office he’s now set up next to the dryer. Hart’s hammering home the point that each image he’s sharing has been snapped with an iPhone, the very tool that the Sun-Times is reportedly relying on reporters to use to in place of professional photographers.
“I thought it was a great way to both mock my situation and celebrate it,” Hart said when we spoke to him by phone this morning. Either way, the blog has become his storytelling outlet: “that’s what we were trained to do as photojournalists,” he said.
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on DPReview Connect. We have syndicated it with permission.
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