Is it even photojournalism if the subjects are obviously posing?
Exactly; it's attempted street-cum-photojournalism. And not without a little shot at using the resulting imagery as attack within LuLa.
Spanish tv last night showed the Catalan separist mobs in Barcelona confronting police of all kinds because the leaders of the rebellion had finally received their prison sentences. Just as in Hong Kong: airport lock-down; innocent travellers unable to enter or leave for hours, connections missed. What did British tv show of it?
On the ground, marchers and crowds waving flags, strutting into camera and saying it's about democracy! They could equally have been supporting the Bacelona footlball team. One guy showed a little red mark on his elbow, reminiscent of those left on the skins of tourists who don't know better than to scratch a mosquito bite. Everything today is "about democracy"; every crackpot little twerp with an agenda and the ability to excite even more dumb crowds claims he's doing it for democracy. Wait; that US lady who accidently killed a British motorcyclist will find soon herself embroiled in chants of democracy.
And that's another example of how the UK press sucks at its job: the parents of that poor kid have been taken over by the press, flown to the US and are being pushed into situations they would never have accomplished on their own. Their grief is being channelled into political battles about diplomatic immunity, none of which will bring the victim back, ease the loss. They harp on about another modern totem: closure. Fuck me, you lose somebody you love and who means the world to you and there
is no bloody "closure: the hurt doesn't vanish by magic because somebody else is in prison, has been lynched or whatever. Closure is a concept that lives within the same box of verbal and politically correct bullshit as everything else these days; it's something that has a solution price in dollars or in public vindication. It's meaningless beyond the confines of marketing newspapers and tv channels and making somebody rich because somebody else has died.