I wanted to write about Jonathan Harris for quite some time. I love his work and what he tries to find or tell with it. He has done some amazing data-visualisation projects like We feel fine, I want you to want me or Sputnik, but what I think is his most interesting work are projects with a clear storytelling approach and giving the user some chance to find their own way through the story. The Whale Hunt is such a project. Harris was taking a photograph every five minutes on a journey to a Eskimo family in Alaska and joined them on their Whale Hunt. Like a heartbeat he was rising the number of photographs in moments of excitement. The user can now choose characters, topics and heartbeat to create an individual story.

Another project, what apparently never got published, is called Balloons of Bhutan. The project collected interviews with 117 people in Bhutan about happiness. Harris was talking about that in a TED talk (below). Many of it reminds me of the ideas we had when we developed our project HUMANS.

His latest project is called Today and is something what became somehow a fashion in the last year. A daily photo project that he started when he turned 30 to remember and collect his own stories in life. Some great pictures and a interesting narrative in the video.

“I wanted to find a way to be more in the moment, to be more in every day; to understand time more and to understand my life more, to have more memories — all of these things. Basically, to live more richly, as a human life, not just as a work life.”       ~ Jonathan Harris

“No matter what you do in your life, what you create, what career you have, whether you have a family or kids, or make a lot of money… your greatest creation is always going to be your life’s story. Because it’s like this container that holds all of those other things. That was something I was really interested in with this project, thinking about life itself as a creation, as a story that you’re writing.”

~ Jonathan Harris

Yesterday the world lost one of the great storytellers and fighters for human rights of our time, Tim Hetherington. He was killed in the Libyan city Misarata while covering the frontlines together with three other photographers, one of them, Chris Hondros died later due to his fatal injuries.

Hetherington got widely known for his Oscar-nominated film Restrepo and was not only an acclaimed photographer, but also someone who pushed the border of how we communicate our stories. Last year in an interview with the New York Times he declared photography as a medium for mass-communication as a medium of the past. Working on different film projects over the last years, he was a cameraman for Liberia: An Uncivil War (2004) and The devil came on the horseback (2007). He was working as an investigator for the UN as well. Maybe Tim was also so important for the community because he was seeing the camera first of all as a tool to communicate and tell stories, ready to move on to something else when that fitted better to reach people with his stories as he did with his films in recent years.

I would like to leave you with his last shortfilm Diary:

“‘Diary’ is a highly personal and experimental film that expresses the subjective experience of my work, and was made as an attempt to locate myself after ten years of reporting. It’s a kaleidoscope of images that link our western reality to the seemingly distant worlds we see in the media.”

RIP Tim

When the earthquake hit Japan and the tsunami afterwards reached land, maybe for one of the first times in history it became a disaster that had more citizen journalism than ever. Thousands of Youtube videos appeared on the net with videos of the tsunami rolling in, showing the devasting energy that was at least for me before that unimaginable. With the atomic catastrophy that is now hitting the country with a still unclear result for Japan and also worlds economy it is hard to say how news from there should be covered. When is much too much? What is sensible enough and what becomes disrespectful for the people? Last year in Haiti the coverage of the aftermath became some kind of disaster porn, that made me leave ashamed. In Japan I feel most of the news world till now is doing a better job.

Dan Chung, acclaimed news shooter for the Guardian and well known for his DSLR videos, came to Japan right after the earthquake and covered the aftermath. He published a short video form that on Vimeo what resulted in a big discussion about the use of sliders, music and so on.

One could argue that it was maybe a bit too much too early. At a point where the results of this disaster was still unclear. This was also one of the replies of his editor at the guardian that re-edited the piece for a more news-like piece with voices of the people that give you a different take on the situation (see below). For me personally the use of sliders is in no way a difficult choice. The pictures are stylized to some extend, aesthetical and therefore maybe different than what we see normally, but as Dan points out in his reply to the discussion (and what was also discussed here in the blog before): The aesthetic is what drives people to the picture/video and when the aesthetic helps to connect people with the story, gives them a different insight into it, there is nothing wrong with it.

Human Rights Watch is since some years now coming up with some great multimedia projects to tell the important stories they are researching and trying to create awareness and change for. This piece about the situation of gold mining in Papua New Guinea and the human rights abuses for the people living there is divided into four major topics and could be viewed as a whole ten minute piece of in chapters that cover rape, illegal miners, mercury poisoning and red water. They teamed up with photographer Brent Stirton to cover the visual part of the story.

I don’t want to give you a review on the piece, because I think it is doing very well in telling the story and keeping the attention throughout the piece. More interesting is the way that HRW delivers the information. Beside the core multimedia story they don’t leave you afterwards with a “and now?” but they give you links to more detailed reports, research, additional photographs, a summary and the possibility to embed a html code with a link to the feature plus the obligatory social media sharing options. In the past HRW even allowed people to embed whole features on blogs and so on, what was pretty straight forward I think, but of course they also have an interest to drive people to their website. What I like about most of their features (and this one here as well) is the clean and simple presentation that really puts the story in the foreground and it not overwhelming you with a big pile of information, but allow you an easy access point from where you can dig deeper into the story.

That all said, you can check the feature now by clicking on the picture below. Interesting presentation and even more important story.

A lesson worth listening to: David LaBelle on storytelling.
Produced by Francis Gardler

“I think that’s what’s missing in most photojournalism. For a lot of photographers it’s about “my” pictures or it’s “my” story. And it’s not. They don’t have the sensitivity or the emphasisaty that they need for the people that they are photographing. They are too distant. And again, it’s too much about light, it’s too much about composition. And it’s not about living as a human being with the same fears and the same dreams that we all share.”

And if you like to learn more in the full film, here we go:

Some might have seen it already: We launched the project “HUMANS” last week and with it we also decided to try out the new possibilities of crowdfunding with Kickstarter. We hope that with enough backers we could generate not only some last needed funds to make stage one of “HUMANS” happen, the first leg through Africa from June to December, but also give directly something back from the amazing experiences and stories people will share with us along the way. First: Here is our little trailer:

How does Kickstarter work?

Kickstarter is a crowd-funding platform that allows users to back creative projects, mainly small projects like ours that does not have big financiers in their back. So this becomes your job. But like doing an investment you also get something back at the end when the project happens. This could be in our case everything from ebooks, prints of photographs, personal postcards from Africa, video downloads and so on. Check it out yourself, I think it’s worth it. The trick with Kickstarter is that your money will only been taken when the project reaches it’s funding goal.

For us the decision to make this campaign through Kickstarter has two major reasons. The first is obvious: It helps us get some needed funds to make the project happen. When that would be the only reason, I think we would not have made it and instead would seeked for some bigger companies to sponsor the project (aka the classical way). That leads to reason number two: The project is highly depending on the community effect. We want to reach many people with it and make it something what helps all of us to gain a better understanding of different cultures, here in first place the different cultures of Africa. But we also want to get as many people engage with the project in different ways, last but not least through sharing their own stories. And to be true, we also hope that supporting a project with a small amount of money also raises the interest in the long run as bit and make you a true follower.

Ok, I can understand if you don’t feel like supporting the project with money you might not have. But first, support starts with one Dollar, so not even a third of your coffee in the morning (even when I can understand that this is something really important). So we made it as easy as possible and even for that amount you get something back beside our Thank you!

Are there other ways to support the project?

When you still not feel like supporting the project with your money, no worries, we are also more than happy when you help us with the project by spreading the word for it. Share it on facebook, on your blog, tell your friends about it or just stay in touch with the project on the website. There are many ways to show us some love, make us happy and spread the word about HUMANS. And we are 100% sure that this project will be interesting for anyone who is interested in stories, cultures, people, travel, adventures or this big thing what we call life.

I was recently lucky enough to find out in the last minute that Jan Grarup and Kadhir van Lohuizen were presenting some stories of their work in Copenhagen as part of a tour through Scandinavia organized by Nikon. So I jumped on the bike and used the free hours I had to attend their presentation. If you are interested in in-depth photojournalism and you are not familiar with their work, make sure to check it out.

Later on the tour Jan got interviewed by Magnus Fröderberg of Fotosidan. Some of his thoughts are provoking for an industry that in the last time mainly feels pity for themselves with breaking down budgets in the classical media outlets and he is also bringing the importance of “emphasis, time, closeness and respect” for in-depth photojournalism back into our minds.

“It’s not useful that he/she [the photographer] wants to win an award on someone elses miserable life in Africa. You need to have something to tell in your heart. And if you do that the audience is big.”

And in addition to what I discussed recently here in the blog also maybe interesting was what he said about aesthetics: “Aesthetics are part of a good picture. It’s not the entire picture, but it could very well be the fact that the audience is looking at the picture. Then the question is: What do you put in the picture beside the aesthetics. If you have a journalistic history, do you have a message with the picture. If it is like that it could easily be aesthetic because it makes people look at the picture.”

See the interview by clicking on the picture below:

(see the pictures by clicking on the picture above)

The discussion heated up quite fast, when Damon Winter published a feature story about American soldiers in Afghanistan taken with the Hipstamatic app. He recently got award third prize at the Picture of the Year award for this. The discussion and critique is a lot about the issue of using a iPhone app for documentary work and the applied aesthetics the app is producing. For anyone who haven’t used this app, it applies a certain toy camera felt the pictures with some basic manipulations in color, vignettes and things like that. At the same time in photojournalism all kinds of manipulation is widely forbidden in the idea to not change the content/ story.

Photography is a widely subjective business that is depending on the composition, framing, light situation and last but not least the use of the tool to shoot the picture, all influenced by the point of view of the photographer. A shallow depth of field is a tool to give the photograph a certain aesthetic or in it’s best way to tell the story how we think it is right. Same applies to use of b/w, use of flash and so on. None of this choices are manipulating the image in a sense of taking something away from it or adding content, but they lead our eyes to specific parts of the story. How difficult that could be is something I discussed in a former post.

Damon Winter now made a statement that discussed the critique and one of his core points and in my opinion misunderstanding of the discussion is that he sees it as a discussion about aesthetics. He is right when he says that basically “the heart of all these pictures is a moment or detail or an expression that tells these story of these soldiers day to day lives while on a combat mission.” No content has been added or taken away in his opinion. The difficult question I think here is the question of how the aesthetics drive the story in this photoessay. When it would be only about the aesthetics, it might not be such a big problem, but I think the main problem is how it leads us in a certain feel, thoughts and atmosphere that is created by the app and not by the content of the photograph. The filter of the app is quite powerful in creating a certain feel, to some extend, no matter what picture you take. The aesthetics is driving the story and not the story is driving the aesthetics. And this is in my opinion the main point of critique that leads to the question what these pictures tell us and what that makes us think of the situation in Afghanistan. It is hard to say how the response would be if these pictures would be made without the stylized aesthetics of the app. Would the pictures have told us the same?

With taking the picture we make a lot of decisions on how we tell the story, but still it should be about the story and how to tell it in the best way. If the feel of the pictures tells the story he was experiencing in the best way, he might be right in using the app, creating some youth adventure camp atmosphere, with pictures that feel as if they could be taken by the soldiers themselves, but then it might be more honest to ask the soldiers for their cellphone pictures documenting their lifes. Not as compelling aesthetically maybe, but more honest I think.

I can imagine that showing the war in Afghanistan from an unseen point of view is difficult to tell from the widely photographed perspective on American soldiers on the ground, so I could imagine that is was one of the reasons for Winter to use this approach, but wouldn’t it be better to look for other stories instead of telling the same story with another aesthetic?

Is awarding pictures like that with an award for documentary photography the “End of photojournalism” as Hendrik Kastenskov of the Bombay Fc questioned some days ago? Maybe not, but at least it is a big alarm bell I think to focus on the story and make the choice of aesthetics to tell the story in the best way and make it not take over so that the aesthetics become the story in itself or at least is overlaying the story to an extend that a lot of it gets lost. No matter if your tool is f1.2, an iPhone app, tilt-shift lenses, pinhole cameras or your DSLR with a 50mm.