Reporting the world for 50 years

The wars may have been smaller, relatively speaking, in the last 50 years, but technological advances have been mammoth. This has benefited photographers such as Pulitzer prize-winner Horst Faas, now AP's European bureau photo editor, who filed his first reports in the 1950s in Morse code, and CNN's Europe, Middle East and Africa correspondent, Richard Bly-stone, whose job would be entirely different were it not for satellites and microchips.

If the ways of sending reports and photographs of carnage have improved apace, however, images have become increasingly easy to manipulate, and staunch believers in the integrity of war photo-reportage have become fearful for the medium's reputation. Will audiences learn to distrust photo-journalism as they have the words that accompany it? And if images gained at the risk of lives are then adjusted in line with convenience, what are these journalists risking those lives for?

These are some of the issues Faas and Blystone are likely to raise in tomorrow's lecture in aid of journalist Don McNicoll's stroke rehabilitation fund. An exhibition of war photographs and a film of extracts from Requiem, Faas and Tim Page's heartbreaking book of pictures taken by photographers who died on duty in Vietnam and Indochina, will illustrate and expand the subjects under discussion.

Tomorrow, Royal Geographical Society, 1 Kensington Gore SW7, 6.15pm, £15. Tel: 020 7771 2000. Info: 020 7730 8930. Tube: South Kensington