[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: multimedia
Duckrabbit’s Benjamin Chesterton on the Blindfolded Photographer
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 [...]
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 [...]
Interview: Brenda Ann Kenneally on recording the lives of “Upstate Girls”
Earlier this week, we talked with Brenda Ann Kenneally, an independent photojournalist who chronicles coming of age in post-industrial America. Her project, “Upstate Girls: What Became of Collar City” won first place at the World Press Awards for Daily Life Stories in 2009, and provided the basis for the collaborative multimedia project “Women of Troy,” our [...]
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 [...]
Interview: Ted Genoways on journalism and documentary poetry
Poetry may not be the first vehicle journalists come up with when they think of reported stories—in fact, poetry may not be on most journalists’ list at all. Virginia Quarterly Review editor Ted Genoways hopes to change that. In addition to garnering three National Magazine Awards for VQR during his reign, Genoways has a book of poems [...]
Environmental narrative: from reindeer herders to sustainable prisons
Between following firefighters in Washington’s Methow Valley and the semi-nomadic Sami reindeer herders of Norway, Sara Joy Steele and Benjamin Drummond are putting together some innovative chapters in their large-scale documentary project Facing Climate Change, in which they examine the world’s changing climate through its effects on local people.
Drummond’s photographs are often breathtaking motion shots [...]
Starting with pictures
The St. Petersburg Times’ latest narrative project started with photographer John Pendygraft’s wife giving him an assignment. A medical reporter, she had been covering the policy issues of the health care debates, but rarely got more into her pieces than a quote from those struggling with healthcare issues. After meeting a woman who was going through insulin [...]
