After coming back some days ago i was going through my RSS reader and with the biggest amount of stuff not so important to not be missed, i also found some pearls. One of these pearls is this beautiful while simple audioslideshow/photofilm by Eric Johnson about New York’s biggest men’s homeless shelter. The beauty for me comes for me because of three things. First, the compelling images that give you a deep feel for the shelter. Eric stayed some nights there to get a feel for that and for me that is shown in his pictures. Getting close pays off always. Second, the audio quality is amazing, really organic, alive, a lot of history captured. This is really something where i work on a lot to get better and pieces like that show me that it is 100% worth it to learn more and more on that. And third, the pure simplicity of the whole piece. Giving the power to the voice of Carl Foye, a powerful yet unobtrusive soundscape, sticking to the pure power of pictures and a clear storyline with a powerful and surprising ending, this all makes it classic and powerful at the same time. A great piece no one who is interested in multimedia productions should miss.

Thanks to Benjamin over at duckrabbit for pointing that out. And now enjoy this piece.

Hot pools, Reykjanes penninsula, 2 am, an hour after we landed in Iceland, shot with the Lumix GF1.

I’m back since two days from my two week holiday/ stock shooting journey through the mysterious Iceland, the land of sagas, vulcanos and most recently also famous for some massive financial crisis. It has been a blast and after two weeks with barely any cellphone or internet access it is hard to get back into the digital world again, i can tell ya. So i take it slow today and only give you this one impression above from the first night in Iceland. In the next weeks i will upload some of the series i shot during the trip. It was an interesting learning process as i’m for sure not the classic landscape photographer. I’m too inpatient to sit for hours and wait for the right light and getting up at 5 in the morning to catch the best light (even when there is always light at this time of the year in Iceland..) is for sure not to be considered as one of my favorite things to do. So i was pushing myself to try out, experiment, learn new things and push myself in some new directions. The great thing about that process is always that it at the end makes you richer in what you see and gives you more knowledge in how to shoot it. And this is something what is helpful for all my photography. And i learned a lot, also about other parts of my photography that i normally shoot and how i might push it in the future. Inspiration not only comes from what you normally shoot, it mainly comes when you leave your comfort zone to try new things.

At the end I had a hard time from time to time to focus on the landscapes and not spent days on telling some of the extraordinary stories of the people along the way, but it was also holiday in it’s major purpose. I will for sure get back as soon as possible to work on some stories, like this wonderful, totally chaotic old bookstore and it’s owner or the iceseaswimmer society or the Haitian woman now living in Reykjavik and many other things. Iceland is for sure amazing in it’s pure and raw nature and the perfect place to forget time and space around you, but all this stories are one of the reasons why it became such a rich trip, filled with life and at the end not only left me in awe of the nature at the end.

Always great to get back there. But now it’s time to jump back on track here and dive into emails, projects, applications, editing and other things to be done.

I’m still in Iceland and as i promised last week, for all lovers of icelandic music here is something special. Iceland is running right now a big campaign to get the tourist business running again after financial crisis, vulcanos and other unplanned circumstances. So they developed Inspired by Iceland, a website that not really is the classic type of tourist information. It is quite a modern way to motivate people to come to Iceland. Watch the livecams of some of the attractions or take part in sharing your stories why you love Iceland as some hundred others did before. Or you watch some music. They recently played a big concert with a bright lineup of Icelandic bands, streamed it live on the net and also afterwards made it available to watch. Quite nice! You could blame me for jumping on the marketing train here, but hey, it is great stuff, so let’s share and enjoy it. Beside the fact that there could never be something wrong with talking about and showing how beautiful Iceland is. Below is one of the pre-produced videos for the concert with GusGus. You can see all videos and the concert here.

I headed to Iceland last friday. I will travel a bit with my girlfriend and shoot stock. This is somewhat a dream destination of mine, not only since the first time  i traveled there, but since my childhood, watching this youth series ‘Nonni & Manni’. It is the perfect place to come down, relax and find yourself in the most amazing landscape you can imagine. I also decided to leave computer and stuff back at home. So don’t expect updates here for the next two weeks, only if you like icelandic music as i do, watch out next monday for something nice. Before that, enjoy some beautiful shorts i found in the last month for a Iceland special of my series Visual Impact. No words. Just visuals.

As some of you might know, i was shooting in Istanbul last week on assignment for the project ‘Temporary City’. The project will run this year as part of the European Cultural Capital 2010 in the three capitals Istanbul (Turkey), Pecs (Hungary) and Ruhr (Germany). The project tries to intervent into urban spaces that have a special interest or a special problem. For three weeks time the project creates something new, but temporary to change the perception of the people that use this space. I think it is really interesting how we percieve our daily environment and what it influences. Every city has it’s own spaces and own obstacles to work with and some time ago architecture and city-planning students from the three countries came together to create solutions for this spaces. The first one now was realized in the Halic shipyard at the Golden Horn in Istanbul, an area, surrounded by traffic lines (so not easy to access) and still in use for repairing ships. There are thoughts to make it a creative center at some point, but for now ‘Floating Surfaces’ was made to bring a picture of this space to the public. Below you can find the short film i made for the project in Istanbul. Let me know what you think! You can read more about the Temporary City project here.

This is the last part of a three part series about the use of media for NGOs. For more read part I and part II.

The biggest question before and after is the thought of who you want to reach with your pictures, videos or multimedia. Especially in the first part i was writing about visual language and how that affects the viewer of your stories. In this last part, with this thoughts in mind, i want to talk about how to use this different forms of visual language and media for communication purposes. This will be a lot about the delivery and how to get out the most of the material we have produced.

CONCEPTS*

Every concept for a new campaign involves thoughts about the audience we would like to reach with our media and that influences what type of media we use, but also what visual language. Beside that there is a lot to think about how we would like to involve people with our campaign in the cause. This is always the most important aspect and worth a lot of time spending on it. Do you want people donate money? Do you want to make them aware of an issue? Or do you maybe want both? How can we involve them? Do we mainly need a fast emotional overloaded fast donation we need like in an emergency like the Haiti earthquake or do we want to create a long-term relationship with the donors? Each one of the answers to this questions is in need of approaches obviously. So every concept is different at the end as there are way more specific question for every cause. So i will not draw some concepts here.

INVOLVING PEOPLE*

Important tough is in my opinion the thought of how to involve people. The way of communication, especially for NGOs (always tight in communication budget..) changed quite a bit with the internet and social media specifically. There are a lot of powerful tools out there, for free use. But at the same time also the form of communication with donors and other people changed through that. It is not a classic advertising communication (promoting your ‘product’ in a one-way-communication) anymore, instead it involves people, with writing comments, spreading the word further with this tools, getting feedback, questions. In short, it allows a direct communication and not only a delivery of a product like a brochure what is first of all only giving information. The direct communication allows not only to get the feedback, but also to activate people, make them interested with not only making them consume, but also actively taking part. A powerful way to involve people in a cause, sometimes maybe even more important than actual donations from the start. Check the Condition Critical project by MSF for a great example on that.

APPROACHING PEOPLE*

In a recent interview photojournalist Tim Hetherington stated “You should be interested in this because this is Afghanistan” — is not a constructive way to engage.” What he is talking about is the approach that many choose when it comes to important issues. By giving people the feeling that they have to be interested because it is important. With the change of communication, i believe, this approach is also more and more going away and new forms to engage people should come up. There are thousands of issues were it is tried to give the feeling of remorse as a tool to engage. Think of Climate Change as an example. No one has to be engage, but when we provide something what makes people interested in the cause, we could reach them in a totally different mindset.

VISUAL COMMUNICATION*

One thing that changed quite rapidly with the internet and the overflow of media. We consume way more visually than a couple of years ago, also because reading on a screen is still a pain in the are. Adding to that is the fact that most people are visual learners, what means the impact of visual media on them will be higher than words. What that means for information provided on websites of NGOs is that it should focus on clear visual interesting storytelling to make people interested with visual content. People will barely read in the web long reports from projects, especially not when there is a short video or multimedia. But words in combination with multimedia could do the trick if used in balance.

NOW WHAT?*

The last bits focused a lot on communication in the internet, also because i think it is one of the major platforms to reach people and get fresh information out. But there are of course the classic way to communicate with your audience. Lectures, brochures, advertising, tv-spots to name a few are still powerful. The advantage of a mixture of the different types of media i talked about in the second part is that it allows the use also in this different other outlets. Especially multimedia produced material offers video, photos, audio and all that what could be used for other purposes as well. I believe that it is not about communicating one way to get donors, the chance that comes for NGOs nowadays is bigger. It could engage people not only to donate, but also to involve them, make a cause important to them, connecting with people, leaving comments, spreading the word and helping to make the cause out in the world. Not because they are told it is important, but because they think it is important.

What you see on the picture below is the poor rest of Sulukule, one of the neighborhoods with the longest history in Istanbul (some even consider it older than the city itself.). It was home of Roma community for hundreds of years. After a long fight to save this quarter it is lost now to a ‘gentrification’ project and the Roma were moved to outside neighborhoods. Sulukule was once famous for it’s music, culture and art.

One of the interesting things you could see on the picture are the metal fences that go through the whole area. There are likely three or four houses were still people live. You go through this long corridors to reach them and i can’t help but having this feeling of being in or outside a prison. Long walls, where you can’t look behind.

Istanbul is a city on the move in many ways and being the European Cultural Capital 2010 (with a budget around 500 million euros) might have paced up some processes even when no one really could tell me, where that is. “We have so many events here all the time that you can’t see a difference when there are some in the name of the Cultural Capital.”, one of the students from the project i was documenting the last days said. But at least it seems to me that many projects on the line and in the planning for a long time got through the Cultural Capital at least an extra push. And maybe it is not a surprise that Sulukule was finally poured down at the beginning of the year.

It is always a difficult conflict city-planning is in, keeping the old, the history, the culture, but at the same time modernize. For a long time (and still happening everywhere..) city-planning focused on creating something people afterwards can connect with. Nowadays participation is the way how to do it many say. But also here you have to get people together and actually talk about it. A process what i was told is hardly working in Istanbul.

In Sulukule no one asked the Roma families. And the Roma culture as in many other countries, seemed to be not something worth saving or keeping alive. One of the problems i was told is in this case also not only the rude city-planning that just planned to re-build the whole neighborhood, but also the lobby of the Roma that was weak. Part of the Roma are integrated fully into the islamic culture and consider themselves as such, the other part not, what makes the inner communication more difficult i was told.

In any way it maybe was a fight hard to win against financial interests, a strong islamic community that should become a new center there. We have seen things like that happening all over the world but the people without a voice, the poor and weak are the ones that lose at the end, no matter if it is in Mumbai, Nairobi or here in Istanbul. But here it is beside that also a culture slowly getting destroyed.

Some of the Roma families already came back to Sulukule, now living hidden in the ruins. The main reason is that they can’t afford the new houses they were moved to or the way into the city is to long.

Sidenote: I had planned to work on a little story on that, while i was in Istanbul, but my main assignment kept me busy so that i only had the chance to visit it once and talk to people there and some city planners i was working with on another project this week. So no pictures, but maybe this little insight gave you a glimpse of the story, even when there would be way more to write about it. If you are interested in more, check Ciara Lemming, who was attending the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop the week before and worked on a story about a Roma family. You can find her pictures here.

UPDATE: Ciara made a new tight edit of her work from Istanbul. You can find it here, also downloadable as a pdf. Great stuff!

I’m in Istanbul right now for an assignment and it looks as if it’s going to be busy the next days, so don’t expect frequent updates here in the blog. But to keep you entertained, you can read two interviews about my work i gave recently for the well-known blogs of Heber Vega and Tracy Boyer. As a side note: I hope i will find a little bit of time for some personal work (what barely look like it, but…) before i head home to Copenhagen for a short stop, locking myself in the editing suite for some days before heading to Iceland, what might again result in a lack of updates (no internet in the highlands, for sure not!). But i will try to share some of the photography and video in between with you. But getting back to the interviews…

(click on the pictures to get to the interviews)

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The blog Innovative Interactivity by Tracy Boyer is focusing on the new possibilities that media has through new media, multimedia, interactive websites and so on. One of their strongest categories is called ‘Innovative Individuals’ with a lot of the big names in the industry being featured there. I feel quite honored to now be part of this exclusive round. So if you are bored by listening to my thoughts all the time, these people are for sure a good source for some interesting thoughts and inspiration. You can find the interview with me here.

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Heber Vega is a humanitarian worker also working as a photographer for NGOs. He is based in Iraq and started his blog some months ago as a source for humanitarian and travel photographers with also a pretty powerful interview series called 10Q. He featured some of the most well-known photographers out of this industry in his series, so also here i’m quite happy to be part of it and share my thoughts about it. And also here, check out the other photographers for some more inspiration. You can find the interview with me here.

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P.S.: …and to give you a small impression from Istanbul, here are two pics from today.

I’m normally writing in this blog mainly about other interesting documentary projects or my work and tips for you. But Chase Jarvis, who recently had another assignment shooting a campain for SanDisk, put up some nice behind the scenes videos, i wanna share with you. SanDisk this time also gave him some video-budget after the behind the scenes stuff from the last campain was so successful. In my opinion one of the best decisions they could make. Chase blog is widely famous in the photography world- and who are the clients of SanDisk? Right, the photographers. And what sells better as the not smash in the face advertising in the whole world of social media. A bit of unobtrusive mentioning of the product once in a while and no one will feel offended or gets tired. In my mind this could become a more successful campain for SanDisk than the actual advertising. Powerful to see how you can really use social media. And maybe also something to spent some thoughts on for other genres like journalism or NGO work. One of the powerful things with the clips, Chase put up is for sure that it offers some valuable information, like his 12 tasty photo + video tips or the back up workflow he and his team are doing of a shoot. This is also why i put this videos here for you. Maybe the best way of advertising nowadays is exactly that: Offering some valuable information for free and subliminal getting your message across.

This is the second part of three part series about Media and the use for NGOs in their communication. Read the first part here.

Last week i was writing about the visual language and how we can use it to deliver different messages in our NGO work. Today is the next step. While last week it was more or less about visual media in general, i wanna look in todays post into the different types of media we have to tell the stories we want to tell. I will not exclusively talk about visual media as i think the other forms we have are powerful as well and it would be stupid to forget about them. So let’s jump right into it.

Words*

A lot of the communication an NGO is doing is coming through words, if it is at presentations, the brochures or the website. The written has still a big part in the form of communication. In my mind it has a couple of advantages. First: It could easily be adjusted to the needs of the story. With a photograph you might be missing in the story you can’t really reproduce it easily. Words at the same time ‘only’ need the knowledge and the experience to tell the story (leaving beside a general discussion about quality of storytelling). This means it is a easy to use way to communicate a story. At the same time the reader has to trust the words. A photograph, audio interview or videoclip is testimony that is (tough still subjective) in our perception closer to the truth. But, and this is also important, it is easier to draw a picture of complex situations or stories with words than with a photograph or the single perspective of one interview. With the use of the internet, in my opinion, also the way of how we consume has changed a lot. Long texts on NGO websites might be read only by few as the whole way of consuming content got way more visual in the last years.

Audio*

The closest to written words is for sure audio. It brings us a level of personal story that written words can hardly have. It also influences us emotionally way more than written words normally do. A big plus for 90% of the stories NGOs want to tell as most of the impact on people their stories have is on an emotional base. We get more of a certain person or some atmosphere sounds as well. It brings us more in the scene. It is not said for nothing that audio is in film 50% of the quality. Once watch a film without the sounds, i think it is crazy how fast you loose track of the story. At the same time audio is good adjustable in the editing of the direction of stories for instance.

Photography*

Photography has been widely used by NGOs. The quality might be very different, but the visual testimony of the situations and projects is a powerful tool. The biggest amount of people are visual learners. At same time photography is so powerful because it is static in one way, but that allows also the viewer to take time, wander around in the picture. The  situation is not changing, it gives time to build an emotional relationship. The viewer is able to find his own way into the story and through it. It is a testimony of a certain moment that try to tell the story. At this is also the point, why high quality photography can be so much more powerful in the impact on people. We are used to a huge amount of visual impact each day and a lot of photography is filled up with certain amount of related stories in our heads. That makes photography a very powerful emotional tool. One of the disadvantages of photography is one of it’s powerful abilities. It is only capturing one specific moment. Photoessays are one way to get over that problem.

Video*

Classic videostories about projects have always been a good way to share stories. It combines audio, moving images and the moving image is directing the viewer through the story. This is a huge difference to photography, not only because of the audio, but also because of the clear direction of the viewer. One could argue that photography can also direct the viewer with lines , light/shade and so on, but still video is faster, not giving so much time for the viewer and the moving part of the image has a huge power to draw the attention of the viewer. Used rightly it can have a huge impact on the knowledge side, but powerful photography might have the higher emotional impact.

Multimedia*

The combination of more or less everything what i said above could be found in multimedia. Many photojournalists right now jump on the multimedia train with extending their photoessays with audio to tell stories more deeply. It combines the power of both audio and photography in one. It could be easy to produce, when you combine for instance an interview with a set of pictures, as well. High level multimedia is something different tough, when it combines atmosphere sound, interviews and music, fine tuned to the pictures. But thinking back of what said about photography and video, a combination of those two with powerful audio could be the most powerful way. It combines the advantages of photography (making the viewer explore the scene himself, higher emotional impact, and so on) with the ability to transmit knowledge and direct the viewer to certain parts of the story. What that brings, when used right, is complex, but also quite obvious. It is a combination of the most powerful storytelling tools that could be very fine tuned on delivering the message. There are other advantages in multimedia i will talk about in the last part of the series, so stay tuned.

In the last part, that will be online in two weeks, i will write about the different ways to use media and deliver. We came from the general thoughts on how we want to tell something to the forms of media we can use to tell that. So in the last part it will be about the use of what we produced to deliver our story/ message to possible donors.