[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 [...]
Category Archives: images
Duckrabbit’s Benjamin Chesterton on the Blindfolded Photographer
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.
Luckily, he found another [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Interview: Studio 360’s Lu Olkowski on multimedia, poetry and the working poor
We talked by phone last week with Lu Olkowski, a contributing producer with public radio’s Studio 360 and co-creator of our latest Notable Narrative, “Women of Troy.” Here, Olkowski describes how the Troy story came together and looks at its parent project, “In Verse,” which combines photography, sound and poetry to create a new kind of multimedia.
How [...]
Poetry as narrative journalism? You’d be surprised.
When people talk about journalism tottering off into quaint irrelevance, there is a tendency to compare journalism to poetry. In a post this week at PBS Idea Lab, Spot.Us founder David Cohn considers whether journalism, like poetry, might not be sustainable.
Cohn notes that there is nevertheless no shortage of poetry. And it’s true that people are still writing it in droves—as [...]
Notable Narrative: the expansive, defiant “Women of Troy”
An ambitious effort to present working-class women in down-at-heel Troy, N.Y., “Women of Troy” brings the hard life front and center. The project is the first installment of “In Verse,” which bills itself as a collaboration between poets, photographers and radio producers trying to create a new model of storytelling journalism.
“Women of Troy” casts its [...]
Errol Morris in The New York Times on still photography and context
So much depends upon a stuffed Mickey Mouse lying in the debris of a bombed-out building. In a weekend post on The New York Times site, Opinionator Errol Morris takes on distinctions between art, journalism and propaganda in “It Was All Started by a Mouse (Part 1).”
Morris looks at (and reposts) a set of images [...]
Picturing community: an interview with Los Angeles Times’ photographer Francine Orr
Photographer Francine Orr had experience reporting on poverty and humanitarian crises around the globe. But while working on “Gimme Shelter,” an audio slide show about L.A.-area homeless people living under a bridge, she found plenty to cover—and plenty to fear—right in her own back yard.
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Orr spoke about the dangers of reporting on mentally ill addicts:
“There’s such a history of random violence along the river. Everything is okay there until it’s not, and sometimes you don’t have warning before it changes. I always had to be aware of who was standing behind me, because I didn’t want someone to smash the back of my head while I was doing my work.”
And on how she views journalists’ responsibilities to subjects, Orr had this to offer:
“I’m a journalist; I’m not a social worker. If I do my job well, I present the story in a truthful manner, in an accurate manner, in a somewhat compassionate manner. I leave it to the viewer, to the reader, to respond. If they feel there is a need or an injustice that requires some action, that’s their role. My role is to present the story.”
Read the full interview.
Intimate journalism: thoughts from a veteran and a beginner (part 1)
Storyboard recently talked about visual storytelling and intimacy with two very different journalists: an independent 30-year veteran and a newsroom staff photographer just two years out of graduate school. Tomorrow, we’ll learn what it was like for a seasoned pro to turn a camera on his own family in the midst of crisis. Today, we hear from Sonya Hebert of The Dallas Morning News, who finished a master’s program in visual communications in 2007.
Hebert’s two large-scale efforts to date include a look into adult palliative care at Baylor University and a portrait of a family whose baby lived only five days as a result of a genetic defect. Her video of the baby and his parents pairs beautifully with the print story in “Choosing Thomas,” a multimedia project selected earlier this year as a Notable Narrative.
On trying to shoot intimate pictures of sick adults under less-than-ideal conditions, Hebert says,
“What we saw over and over again was a patient in a bed in a hospital room. Visually it looked all the same, so it required tuning out what I was hearing, and really looking. Thinking, ‘How can I tell this story visually?’ Sometimes it was getting tight in on someone and waiting for them to look up in a certain way in a dark room—being ready for something to happen.”
Later, Hebert struggled with the challenge of making Thomas, a terminally-ill baby, fully human for viewers:
“In the middle of editing, I didn’t feel like the reader could fall in love with Thomas. I was worried about doing a story about a baby to begin with, and he was tougher, because he didn’t do a lot. There were just a few moments where he was like a normal little baby and you could see how cute he was. There’s a clip where he’s sneezing, and TK is saying, ‘Oh, that was my eye!’ It was something to bring a lighter side to the story before we got into the heavy dying part.”
Read the full interview.
