Duckrabbit’s Benjamin Chesterton on the Blindfolded Photographer

[We recently met Benjamin Chesterton at the Frontline/ICP symposium, where he participated in a discussion on the future of visual narrative. He had some strong opinions about photojournalists and storytelling, and we thought our readers would be interested in hearing his ideas. —Ed.]

One surefire way to irritate blind people is to think that you can put a blindfold on for an hour or two and understand what it is to be blind. It sounds like a good idea until you really start to think about it. I should know. I once set out to make a radio documentary for the BBC about the contrasting ways in which the visually impaired and the sighted experience the countryside.

For the purposes of the program I intended to blindfold the presenter Richard Uridge and send him up a hill accompanied by two “real” blind people. It was a dumb idea on many levels, not least because the program would have ended up being about the rather superficial experience of the presenter. The majority of the audience no doubt would have loved the show because they love Richard, but it would have been as deep as a puddle. The story would have been all about him.

What’s this got to do with photojournalism? As I have been discovering over the last couple of years, a little too much.

My interest as both a practitioner and commentator is principally about how we use photography to tell stories about the developing world. In his book Truth Needs No Ally, Howard Chapnick writes of photojournalists,

“They give a voice to the voiceless, power to the powerless, and help to the helpless.”

It’s a widely held and romantic view of a profession whose lifeblood is often the worst the world has to offer. But what worries me is the pictures we celebrate and the two-dimensional stories they sometimes tell.

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by Benjamin Chesterton | Mar 18, 2010 | posted in images, multimedia, talking about story | comments (0)
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Paul Nicklen goes to extremes with Polar Obsession

Just a few minutes talking with Paul Nicklen reveals his compulsion to educate the world. Ask a question about his polar adventures, and he segues quickly into arthropods, krill and dangerous drops in the levels of polar sea ice. He carries within him the ghost of the marine biologist he nearly became.

Paul Nicklen/National Geographic

Luckily, he found another way to share the stories of the polar ecosystems that are his lifeblood: he has learned to visit with animals and to take pictures. The job sounds much simpler than it is. In order to tell the stories he wants to tell in Polar Obsession, our latest Notable Narrative, Nicklen allows a leopard seal—an animal not above killing humans—to take his head and camera in her jaws underwater.

He keeps company with polar bears, which have been mauling intruders for more than 400 years. He makes it a habit to stay in polar seas to shoot pictures until he cannot feel his limbs. He has sustained permanent damage from cold and frostbite.

Seeing his pictures in National Geographic does not provide this background. Yet his commitment to an overarching narrative comes across in each image of the animals whose pictures he takes—animals whose existence is threatened by a temperature increase that remains abstract to so many of us. Though many of the pictures celebrate the lives of these animals, the realization that they are at risk transforms the polar light and the isolation of the landscapes, tapping into an undercurrent of loss.

Nicklen acknowledges that it can be hard to care about krill, or sea ice. However, he believes that he might motivate us to action by showing the creatures that could fall victim to more advanced stages of the disease just beginning to afflict the planet. Nicklen has learned that the medicine of what needs to be done goes down better with a beautiful story.

[For more, read our interview with Nicklen, in which he talks about the most wrenching story he’s done (“I’m still messed up over that”) and explains how storytelling goes beyond taking pretty pictures of animals. The images on his siteare uncaptioned, but captioned versions can be seen on the National Geographic and NPR Web sites.]

by Andrea Pitzer | Mar 17, 2010 | posted in Uncategorized, images, notable narratives | comments (1)
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Paul Nicklen’s Polar Obsession: “I had finally found a way to really connect with readers”

Paul Nicklen, a photographer with National Geographic, was going to call his latest collection of images Bipolar Obsession on a lark, to reflect his trips to both poles. He settled instead on Polar Obsession and freely admits that he is, in fact, obsessed—not just with the animals and his pictures of them, but with getting out the story of how the animals’ lives are changing. In these excerpts from our talk, he discusses the future of still photography, the value of preventive storytelling, and our “ADHD society.”

When did you first pick up a camera? Did you have formal training?

It was probably 1988 when I first started. I don’t have training. I never went to any photo school. I shot on my own for five, six, seven years. And then I met Flip Nicklin from National Geographic, and he took me under his wing.

Paul Nicklen/National Geographic

In a National Geographic interview , you say that it’s not just about the animals or the pictures, that you’re committed to getting a story out. What’s the story you’re committed to?

When I started off in photography, I was trying to shoot pretty pictures of animals. It often left me feeling very empty, because of all the issues out there that weren’t being covered. What I’m trying to do now is show the readers of National Geographic and the world how fragile and endangered all these ecosystems are.

If we lose the sea ice—sea ice is like soil in a garden. Without it things can’t grow. Now, saying the Arctic could be devoid of sea ice in the next five to seven years doesn’t mean anything to someone living in Manhattan. But I use animals like polar bears to show the effects of what’s happening, trying to get people in other places, who otherwise might not think about it, to care.

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by Andrea Pitzer | Mar 17, 2010 | posted in images, interviews | comments (2)
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Still images and storytelling in the digital era: more from the February Frontline/International Center of Photography symposium

[Second in a series of posts about a February meeting on the future of visual narrative sponsored by Frontline and the International Center of Photography.]

With the decline of print newspapers, what will happen to the still images that formed the bedrock of visual storytelling? Veteran photographers, television producers and filmmakers discussed the issue last month in New York during a one-day look at the future of visual narratives.

Ed Kashi, who has done award-winning work in both photography and documentary video, expressed concern that the dominance of video might crowd out a vital storytelling role for still photography. Travis Fox, who worked for The Washington Post for 10 years on still photography and video projects, also wondered about the future, asking, “Are we just becoming short-form documentary people, or are we still photographers? What’s the difference?” Other attendees speculated about the potential loss of the public’s ability to parse still images.

But Brian Storm, president of MediaStorm, doesn’t think that’s likely to happen. After showing “Jumping Rock,” a segment from Danny Wilcox Frazier’s project Driftless (which contains some nudity), Storm said,

“In print, in newspaper, the average newspaper reader looks at a photograph for 0.2 seconds. 0.2 seconds [see *note at end of post for revised numbers from Storm—Ed.]. And in this piece, I’ve got a still picture on the screen for five seconds. I own your attention span. I dictate that you’re going to look at it longer in this format.”

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by Andrea Pitzer | Mar 15, 2010 | posted in images, multimedia, news on narrative | comments (5)

Who rubbed out Arthur Kasherman? Noir, the Star Tribune and a senior thesis combine for multimedia storytelling

A little shy of midnight on a January night in 1945, someone shot Minneapolis muckraker Arthur Kasherman as he sat with a friend in his Oldsmobile. Firing several more times, the gunman pursued Kasherman as he climbed out of the car. Kasherman died at the scene, and the killer—whose name he seemed to have known—was never identified.

Now Minneapolis Star Tribune investigative reporter James Shiffer and multimedia freelancer McKenna Ewen have teamed up to tell the story of the slain journalist. Their project, “Rubbed Out,” has its own site, with a short video, print pieces, interactive maps, police reports, and even a poll inviting visitors to pick who they think is the killer.

The journalists partnered with the Star Tribune, which posted a story from Shiffer online and ran a print piece on Saturday about the murder.

We saw the project on the Online News Association’s Interactive Narratives site this week and called Ewen up to discuss it. “Rubbed Out” turns out to be part of Ewen’s senior thesis—he graduated in December with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and political science from the University of Minnesota. His resume lists internships with the Star Tribune and Bloomberg News, and he has recently launched his own company, Ewen Media.

Ewen described the project as an experiment:

Instead of telling people the story of Arthur Kasherman, we wanted to make it interactive. We wanted people to engage on the site, and we did that by presenting the information as we knew it. We still don’t know who actually killed Arthur Kasherman, but based on the information, we have a fairly good idea. What we wanted to do was to open it up and see what other people thought, and let them go through the same journalistic process that we went through—but with less noise.

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by Andrea Pitzer | Mar 12, 2010 | posted in interactive graphics, interviews, multimedia, print narratives | comments (0)
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Wajahat Ali in McSweeney’s “Panorama”: the American financial collapse as sitcom

When literary magazine McSweeney’s Quarterly jumped into the newspaper business for their winter issue, much of the buzz was about the concept. A literary quarterly does a newspaper? Layout was debated, along with cost and replicability. But inside “Panorama” lurked a delightful, messy nonfiction narrative by Wajahat Ali.

“Wells Fargo, You Never Knew What Hit You” stars Ali, if use of such a deliberately awkward voice counts as starring. Other characters include a California couple (“the Lipkins”) and Wells Fargo Bank, which threatens foreclosure on  the Lipkins’ house.  

Ali’s tale, which has the tone and pacing of an improbable sitcom, relates his first effort as a solo practitioner of California law. He makes us squirm in fear along with him as worries about failing clients whose trust he has inexplicably gained.

Invoking icons from American pop culture in his crusade (Rocky, Bigfoot, a Jedi Knight), Ali portays Wells Fargo as a “feces-covered bear” with whom he has a protracted wrestling match. The story follows Ali’s struggle to find the right person to talk to and the right thing to say to the disembodied telephone voices controlling the Lipkins’ future.

It’s a comic piece, but the tragedy of millions of all-too-real homeowners in foreclosure around the country undergirds the humor with substance. The dozens of unreturned phone calls and Ali’s random discovery of the magic words that get Wells Fargo to respond make it clear just how steeply the system is stacked against the Lipkins in a way that a non-narrative piece never could.

Ali bears watching, as he’s more than a lawyer who has written an interesting first-person story. He blogs and referees submissions at Goatmilk, writes regularly on Muslim communities and issues for The Guardian, and scripted a play about Muslims in post 9/11 America.

by Andrea Pitzer | Mar 11, 2010 | posted in print narratives | comments (1)
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Walk on the wild side: animal stories that don’t stand up

When it comes to wildlife narratives, writer Bryan Christy wants more accountability from reporters.

Christy wrote us in response to our Friday issue of the Narrative Digest, which featured coverage of a zoo, a history of animal experimentation, and an essay on a vet in Sierra Leone, among other articles. He added another a item to the list of issues raised by animal narratives, expressing his frustration that when it comes to stories about humans’ illegal interaction with wildlife, a “focus on animals (and their suffering) tends to give the criminals a bye.”

Brian Christy as a high school student, holding pet snake Socrates.

A high school-era Bryan Christy with pet Socrates

While most of the stories we featured didn’t involve illegal trafficking, it’s an interesting storytelling issue. In a January Huffington Post essay (“Wildlife Smuggling: Why Does Wildlife Crime Reporting Suck?”) Christy argues that “too often wildlife crime stories are little more than eco-tourism pieces with sad endings” and claims that that sloppy reporting for these kinds of narratives has real costs.

He notes a 2007 report from the Secretariat of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which suggests that widespread “gross exaggeration” from the media (along with other groups) doesn’t help the cause of getting more attention to and support for protecting wild animals. (And in fact, the inflated and inexact numbers Christy points to do show up in some major news outlets via Google search.)

But Christy isn’t arguing against a narrative approach to trafficking stories. In “The Kingpin,” from January’s National Geographic, he presents Anson Wong, one of the world’s major smugglers of endangered animals. While there are plenty of gripping details about victimized creatures in Christy’s story, the tale unfolds more as an expose of one man’s willingness to deliver any animal for money and a global system hard pressed to keep him from doing it.

While the lure of safari-style visuals might be hard to editors to resist, shifting coverage to the bigger picture could make for a more accurate story. Christy suggests that treating the issue with the same kind of rigorous reporting applied to other criminal enterprises might be the answer: “More time should be spent on paper and money trails, less on jungle adventures.”

by Andrea Pitzer | Mar 8, 2010 | posted in print narratives, talking about story | comments (3)
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Aminatta Forna’s “The Last Vet”: a dog’s life

Our latest Notable Narrative traces relations between humans and animals in the poorest country on earth. In “The Last Vet,” which appeared in the winter 2009 issue of Granta, writer Aminatta Forna follows Dr. Gudush Jalloh, the last veterinarian in private practice in Sierra Leone, as he treats and sterilizes dogs at his Freetown clinic.

last-vetbLiving in London after having grown up in Sierra Leone, Forna is in many ways perfectly placed to tell Jalloh’s story, although it is also her story and the story of the dogs of this small West African country. She gives us charming images, such as newly neutered patients sleeping off anesthesia (“the paw of one lies across another, strange babies sharing a bed”), but she challenges the reader’s expectations time and again.

A childhood dog returns after a disappearance with “his hind quarters split open to the bone by an axe wound”—a wound that turns out to be less a result of malice than a reader might think. Forna elegantly shows how deeply material circumstances and history have affected the lives of Jalloh, his country and his charges.

By incorporating her debates with Jalloh on the treatment of animals in Sierra Leone and in England, Forna considers an idea they both reject: that helping animals in the midst of human suffering is somehow frivolous. As she weaves the presence of international activists and the staff of the British High Commission into her story, her essay becomes a meditation on empire and colony and an argument that what seems like sentimentality in Jalloh and his compatriots may be something else altogether.

by Andrea Pitzer | Mar 4, 2010 | posted in notable narratives, print narratives | comments (0)
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Chris Jones, Roger Ebert and the possibilities of online narrative (or “does this story ever end?”)

When it comes to writing profiles, Esquire’s Chris Jones is used to getting the last word. But a few weeks ago, when Jones worked his storytelling mojo on Roger Ebert, he took on someone who had his own platform and his own audience.

jones-c“I knew Roger was writing about the story,” Jones told us via email, confessing his hands had trembled when he clicked on the link to see what Ebert had written about his piece. “I mean, he’s a critic, right? And I really enjoyed spending time with him, and I hope he enjoyed spending time with me. I didn’t want him to feel regret for having let me in.

“So, when I read what he posted, I felt like 1,000 pounds had been lifted off my shoulders. I could have received a million letters from other people saying they liked the story, but if Roger Ebert had hated it, I would have felt bad about that, literally for the rest of my life.”

Jones’ moving profile of the film critic drew praise from Ebert, and also garnered a mention by Jim Romenesko and a post from the Cronkite School’s Tim McGuire, who portrayed the article as a call to the journalistic ramparts. And it’s true that the Ebert article is beautifully written, and that Jones is a national continental treasure (it turns out that the Canadians get credit for him, along with Sidney Crosby and Celine Dion).

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by Andrea Pitzer | Mar 2, 2010 | posted in interviews, print narratives, talking about story | comments (0)
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Frontline and the International Center of Photography look at news narratives for a digital era

How will digital opportunities change the way we tell stories? Earlier this month in New York City, a roundtable of journalists from major media outlets and community-oriented news organizations met to consider new narrative possibilities. Funded by Shell, the afternoon symposium was hosted by the International Center of Photography and co-sponsored by Frontline.

frontlineThe discussion wasn’t aimed at forming a consensus on the future of story. Instead, participants highlighted a number of narratives that made the most of new technologies or represented novel approaches.

We’ll cover more of the roundtable in March, but for now, I’ll highlight a few of the projects that were discussed.

“Thirst in the Mojave,” from Zach Wise, ran in the Las Vegas Sun (Wise is now at The New York Times). At the top of the homepage, a panic-inducing counter runs off the remaining days until Lake Mead will (possibly) run dry–which is only one small part of a dazzling array of information available for visitors to the site. The video follows a traditional, linear approach, but additional elements supply context in unusual ways. To read an explanation of each feature, see this post at digitalartwork.net.

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by Andrea Pitzer | Feb 26, 2010 | posted in interactive narratives, multimedia, news on narrative, talking about story | comments (1)
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