On the face of it, Brent Stirton’s portfolio is riven with contradictions. Having started out as a war photographer, he’s since shot Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s first child and more recently found fame with a set of images of African gorillas. But, says this year’s Visa d’Or Features winner, to him there’s no contrast. There’s just the 21st century world as the best way to get his message across in it. Diane Smyth found out more.

BJP: Do you ever feel there’s a contrast between your environmental projects and the type of photojournalism more usually seen at Visa Pour l’Image, which depicts human issues and suffering?
Brent Stirton: No – all these things are connected. The plight of the gorillas in the Virunga National Park is directly linked to Congo’s ongoing conflict and the battle for scarce resources. The war in the Congo is the worst in the world – 5.4 million people have died there since 1996. But the problems are a result of pure corruption, greed and power plays and the same can be said of pretty much any war. We spend too much time isolating incidents and not enough thinking about the connections between them.

BJP: How does the celebrity portraiture you’ve done with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie fit into this work? [Stirton’s photographs of Pitt and Jolie’s first baby, Shiloh, was sold to people magazine for $7m in 2006]
Brent Stirton: The whole mission of photojournalism is to bring about positive change and education, that’s really about it. I could shoot for 20 years and not raise the kind of finance those images raised, all of which was put directly into hospitals and programmes which will directly change peoples’ lives. It’s all one and the same to me. It’s frustrating that there is more money for celerity photographs than photojournalism but I don’t lose any sleep over it. It’s the world we’re in. People work very hard and come home to their distractions. Humans haven’t been out of the cave very long, we’re not very bright. What Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have done is to take that celebrity equation and turn it on its head. When you consider it’s something originally set up by a 26 year old woman it’s really remarkable. I think people should spend more time applauding that and stop looking for the holes in it.

BJP: How has the internet changed photojournalism?
Brent Stirton: We’ve created a 24-hour news cycle to feed an advertising machine. We’ve allowed our economic motivations to outweigh where we are as a civilisation in terms of documenting that civilisation. We’re not thinking about how long it takes to really think about issues. I don’t want to think about sensational pictures, I’m thinking about meaningful, intelligent images.
But I also think that the internet is an opportunity for photojournalists. Look at MediaStorm – Brian Storm turned Paul Fusco’s photographs of Chernobyl into a multimedia presentation and 18m people saw it in the first week. How much money could you make if you charged each person $1, or even 20 cents? [As a photographic community] we’re mishandling this thing. We’re doing a poor job at telling people how much difference they could make if they donated just a small amount of money. We need to get better at attaching value to our images. We need to think of them as commodities with emotional resonance and attach financial value to that.

BJP: It’s interesting to hear you refer to a photograph as a commodity and using the language of business. Have photojournalists been too squeamish about the economics?
Brent Stirton: Photographers have been too precious – it’s ridiculous. This isn’t about us, it’s about the message. We’re reactionary by nature but we need to take that reaction and think about it, to look at the potential.
We’ve made the mistake of resenting business people. Government response to HIV has been nothing less than shameful, genocidal in some countries. The business community has stepped in, providing research, providing retroviral drugs because they can see that if they don’t do something their labour force is history. They’re making a practical business decision which has lead to an improved understanding of humanistic values. I believe HIV infection rates would have been 30 per cent worse without the business community. I want to work with that community, so I’ve been working with the Global Business Coalition, an organisation that includes the 400 most powerful companies in the world. I also work with government thinktanks. In a sense I’m not interested in editorial, I’m interested in influencing business and political decisions. If you’re not doing that, what you’re ultimately doing is indulging yourself at the expense of others.