The Issues Through Photographs II

According to Kobre, the idea for a photo story can surge from many different avenues.  Among these are personal experience, general assignments, topical trends and spotting out the trends yourself.  Finding a newspeg or a hook is also important in deciphering whether there is actually a story to tell.

Using people to represent a particular topic or issue is always a great way to grasp an audience and make them understand what the issue is all about.  Kobre lists several types of people stories namely those that center around the well known, the less known but interesting, the less known but representative of some issue, and finally a single person representing an abstract topic such as a disease like cancer.

Photographer and staffer at the Los Angeles Times Annie Well’s photo diary of her battle with cancer is an excellent example of the latter.  Well’s self-shot photos of her treatments, hair loss, breast burnt from the radiation treatments, and other up and down moments throughout her process with breast cancer are truly amazing.  If you are ever able to get your hands on a copy of Kenneth Kobre’s Photojournalism, The Professionals’ Approach, make sure you take a look at this story on pages 148-151.  This story, I believe, is truly indicative of the power of photojournalism at its best.

Another striking story in this section of the book is one of a welfare father who was left to take care of 4 children after the mother was arrested for welfare fraud.  This photo story can be found in pages 167-171.  The photos show their filthy living space, the children doing chores and sometimes crying, the father giving his children hair cuts to save money, and the tenderness he shows them by holding or comforting them.  Although the photographs are accompanied by some writing, it is that visual aspect that really tells the story and brings the point home.

The more I read this book and look through the photo stories, the more I realize that there is no better way to learn how to produce good, meaningful photo stories than to look at others that have already been done.  More than reading about how to produce these stories, I think that looking through many different examples is slowly helping me to really understand what goes into shooting a series of photographs that really come together to tell a compelling story.

I recently found a great Web site, JPG The Magazine of Brave New Photography that showcases more than 100 photo essays.  Some are issue stories and others are not, but I think they are a great way to learn if you’re interested in producing some of these photo essays yourself!

The Issues Through Photographs I

Photographs have always struck me as a strikingly effective way to provoke people on certain issues. Words can sometimes do the trick, but nothing tugs at your heart like a photograph where you can actually see an issue through the pain in a human face.

Kobre showcases several great issue centered photo stories that clearly demonstrate the potential these kinds of projects can have for exposing issues and bringing about change. One of my favorites is Judy Griesedieck’s “California’s Nursing Homes: No Place to Die” where she exposed some of the horrors going on in these establishments through a series of photos that were published in San Jose’s Mercury News. The pictures were all very simple but also very telling. One of the shots that showcased in Kobre’s book that left the biggest impression of me was that of a nursing home resident asleep in a chair in an empty hall way neglected and unattended, her neck hanging over the side of the chair. This photo story also exhibited the importance of looking at more than one side of the story, something that has often been argued photojournalism projects are unable to do. In addition to showing the negative occurrences at these nursing homes, Griesedieck also incorporated photographs that showed the caring personnel in the homes.

This example also does a great job of delineating some of the struggles a reporter and/or photojournalist might face in gaining access to issue stories, where people might be highly sensitive and defensive of anything that puts an establishment in a bad light. Griesedieck’s work shows that difficulty gaining the access is not a reason to forgo an issue story, only more reason to pursue it and get out the truth to the public so that some change might come from it. A photograph truly is worth a 1,000 words.