A critique of wartime photography, particularly against Lowy and Winter, is that there pictures are no longer photojournalism, but photography. I see this every day in my instagram feed. Epic edited shots of mountain ranges are used to draw attention to climate change. Striking pictures of the aftermath of attacks or accidents seem more aesthetic than real. However, if raw photos lean more towards photo journalism, then shouldn’t raw writing lean more towards journalism? In other words, who is to say an edited picture does not add to a story in the same way a better description or more apt vocabulary choice adds to journalism? That being said, here are my two example of photojournalism I found on my social media.
The first picture was posted to instagram by dina_litovsky on November 8, with the lead picture in the slides being two girls holding an American flag in the rain. I thought this example of photo journalism came froma sociological vantage point, as the pictures seemed structured to meet the expectation of what election night looks like.
An example of photo journalism from a journalistic vantage point comes from the viral video of Kamala Harris fist-bumping Lindsey Graham; I think the use of the video is within the same vein of the judgement of whether journalism deals with actions such as this one, where critique is made on bias, whether something is good or bad.
The question of what a “raw” photo might be is really tricky: like you point out, what would the analogy in text be? What is “raw” writing?
Every choice of word has particular consequences in terms of how a particular event in the world is depicted. Same with images: there is no “objective”, “pure”, or “original” image, since even to the naked eye the very same object will look very different to two observers, even if they’re observing it at the exact same time, under the exact same conditions, and from the exact same point of view (as if such a thing were possible).