Who gets to tell who’s story?

“Cultivating skeptical audiences is our biggest challenge,” said Cristina de Middel, director of Magnum Photos, during the Future Memories symposium at the Rijksmuseum, hosted with World Press Photo.  The event set out to explore how photojournalism shapes memory. What it revealed was something more fragile and more urgent: a profession with an identity crisis.

As a photographer, you can’t avoid shaping the story. The way images are commissioned, selected, edited and published always involves a degree of manipulation — even when your intentions are good. Every choice narrows the frame, leaves something out, or steers the viewer toward a particular reading. That’s the job. But it’s also the problem.

De Middel described the unspoken criteria for success in photojournalism. You need to cover war, migration and prostitution, she said, noting without irony, “If I didn’t go to war, I wouldn’t have made it into Magnum.” But her point wasn’t to endorse the formula. It was to expose how narrow the visual field still is, and how certain images continue to dominate the global imagination.

Her own work addresses established visual language by playing with journalistic conventions. For example, she paid her subjects to pose for her in Gentleman’s Club, which would typically disqualify any journalistic transaction. In this work she turns the lens away from sex workers and towards their clients. ‘There is always a client in the provision of sex work, but we only ever see the supplier.’ Says de Middel. Her male subjects are photographed posed, reclining on unkempt beds, fully visible. It reframes the issue, shifting the focus from those being sold to those doing the buying, while raising the question why we never see this side of the deal.

As Joumana El Zein Khoury, executive director of World Press Photo, said in a frank roundtable discussion, “Who gets to tell whose story?” That question has become central to World Press Photo’s direction in 2025. This year’s anniversary exhibition, curated by de Middel, won’t shy away from confronting the organisation’s own visual legacy. Instead, it will spotlight some of the most iconic and problematic images from its 70-year archive: women crying, men rescuing, bodies arranged in grief. Photographs that serve to bolster a familiar aesthetic, often void of context, or the specific tragedy they depict.

Tanvi Mishra, editor and curator, brought a different kind of clarity. Yes, she said, photography can give voice to the underrepresented. But it has just as often been used to reinforce dominant narratives. She highlighted the work of artist Samantha Box, who uses her studio to subvert familiar, often romanticised depictions of the Bahamas. Through synthetic, carefully constructed scenes that unravel on closer inspection, Box questions not only what we see, but how we come to see it. For her, the studio isn’t just a space for image-making — it’s a space where refusing the gaze can become a form of agency. Photographers, Mishra reminded us, are also citizens. We all live inside bubbles and sometimes we have to be the ones to burst them.

Lebohang Kganye shifted the tone again. Could photography act not just as documentation, but as mourning? What if the image isn’t just evidence, but a container for grief? Her question opened space for photography to be something softer, less resolved — something that holds memory rather than defines it.

The most volatile exchange came as the conversation turned toward coverage of the Israel–Palestine conflict. Sakir Khader and Kadir van Lohuizen voiced strong frustration at what they called a corrupt, even fascist, mass media. But as the panel unfolded, so did a difficult truth. The people critiquing the media were also shaping it. They post, share, build audiences, and publish work through the very platforms they no longer trust. They use the channels they say have distorted public opinion.

This isn’t contradiction for contradiction’s sake. It’s the condition we’re all in. If social media corrodes nuance but visibility is tied to survival, where else can you go?

It felt like journalism needs its own channel now. Something less compromised, more self-aware. The Rijksmuseum didn’t claim to offer it. But maybe, by accident, the symposium showed what it might look like.