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

Ok, ok, it’s already the 10th, but better late than never. Some might have recognized it that it was very calm here in the blog in the last weeks. That does by no means mean that we were unactive. There are a few big changes coming in the next weeks and months, like making the whole archive available for licence, print and so on. Beside that I put it as my main task for the next months to learn the language of my home since last year, Denmark before we will spent the rest of the year more or less in Africa as it seems right now. It is a big project we are planning right now that will focus on the variety of this continent and it’s people, but I’ll tell you more about it in an extra post in the next weeks. This project needs a good amount of planning too. So I hope to stay in Denmark for the next months to get all those things planned and executed, some small detours from time to time included of course. But enough about the state of myself and my projects.

To start the new year here in the blog I want to leave you with some proper inspiration that crossed my path in the last weeks in form of some interviews and talks with great photographers. I don’t want to leave much comments about it, but be sure you will learn something or find some true inspiration in it.

Alex Soth – on a life of approaching strangers

Sebastiao Salgado – The photographer as activist

Matt Stuart – “My super-power would be to be invisible”

Jeff Johnson – About Travel Photography

You wanna know how to find THE iconic picture from Africa? So here are some tips. First, you have two choices in which direction you want to go. Dig into the world of the wild animals and even wilder tribes, that run around naked and eat raw flesh. Or you can go in the direction of the “Starving African”.

The first one is easy. Make sure you get on some Safari and see lions next to some dancing Massai with bushdrums. Take pictures of that. Make sure that you never show anything what could even remind of civilization. When you take the picture, try to get a look as if these people are from before our time. That is important to tell later, how crazy it is that they are still living in such a primitive way. Maybe artificial light is even a good idea to make it even more statue like and away from this world. Focus on the exotic and do everything that people can’t see anything related to our world. It would destroy the feeling of far away.

You are more the hardcore warphotographer type of person? No problem, Africa is your feeding ground. As we know, Africa is a country full of war, famine, rape, corruption  and suffering. So you will find plenty of work to do. Make sure you don’t fall in the trap of looking for something else. There isn’t (beside the wild animals of course). So don’t even look for it. What you look for are a couple of important elements for your pictures. An AK-47 is one of it. But even better could be a club or machete. Yes, this is how they kill themselves every day. So make sure to have it in your pictures. You can only find them using it in the field? Then make them pose in a proper way. Good is always combination of the machete, powerful hands and a naked body (to underline the wildness). No one will care. And if someone asks, just make sure you have a bunch of horror stories to tell about how they use it. That will keep people silent. The starving African is another important element for your pictures. Because they are doing both, they starve or they kill themselves, when they are not right now dying of HIV/Aids. Starving children work especially. There is nothing more moving as a crying starving child, left alone in the wild, without any help in sight.

If you want to make sure that people also see the help that is arriving, never forget to exclude every African aid worker. They are anyway only servants for the wonderful whites that come to safe this dark and lost continent. So, don’t confuse people with including them in your pictures. When you show people in the IDP camps, make sure that they are either looking sad and angry. Yes, because even with all our so selfless help they are not even a little bit thankful. So show this contrast of the caring aid worker and the unthankful African. And only show long lines of hands, begging for food. Make sure that it always looks like chaos. That will implement that there is no way to actually bring any order and structure to this people. Also make sure that there is nothing else to see than their miserable homes or the white aid workers that bring the food. Always good is also the caring celebrity. Show them listening, always and also to Africans. That is important, because they care. And you care too, so make sure your pictures transport that.

When you come across dead bodies make sure to make as many pictures as possible. That are the bread and butter shoots. Don’t think about composition or stuff like that. Who cares about that when you see this great example of the real cruel world of Africa. Never show bodies as something human. It doesn’t matter who the person was as there are thousands of others that are killed too and it also avoids feelings of the spectator to get a too close relation to it. It might only disturb him over the one minute of donation giving. So it’s also good to use some symbols, like some blood and a necklace in the form of Africa. That tells enough. Horror. Africa. And you can of course also change the symbol easily, for instance the AK-47, machete or an empty plate.

Important, and I guess you already came to this conclusion yourself, ALWAYS shoot in black and white. This world is just black and white. It’s the story about the good and the bad. And Africa is a dark continent and choosing black and white also gives all the suffering the for us abstract feel. It’s also more like Art and at the end this is more how it should be. Otherwise stuff might come too close. Also make sure that some vignettes appear regularly in your pictures and the general setup is dark. Even try to rise the contrast to get out the texture in the faces if you can. Always good to create some dynamic is also to make sure the horizon is never straight and some hand, in the best case with a machete, is coming into the picture from the side. It must feel that you were close in the action. Or don’t you want people asking you how you get so close and how you survived this unimaginable horror that is happening down there? Never forget: this is about you. YOU want to change the WORLD with your pictures, not the life of a person. You think BIG! The people you photograph are objects that tell the story of something way bigger and way more important. So never get too close on a personal level. People might start thinking they have their own voice and own opinion.

Ok, you are a critical person, I can see. You tell me there are also good things happening and you want to photograph that? Make sure you get to a school. Because education is really the ONLY thing that helps. Make sure to photograph a classroom with at least 70 children. This will give the perspective that even in this difficult circumstances they are so happy to learn. Make sure you have that, that they all look really happy to learn something, when you take the picture. They are the future of this continent and because we build all those schools, they can learn and get out of the horror. And if you show any kind of joy, make sure it is when they are dancing. Because the only joy they have is singing and dancing.

Before I come to an end, a little advice: If you are doing some lectures or interviews about your experiences, make sure you always talk about we and them. Also make sure that you mention that you expected it horrific, but not that much out of control, hopeless and horrific.

You have read all of it? Now there is only one more step to do. Keep all of that in mind and look for everything else but that. Find the daily life, find the modernization and the joy of life. Find the hope and hospitality. Find the hard working and the specialities of each country. And most important find the beauty. There is a lot going wrong in many countries in Africa, without a doubt. But there is also a lot where each one can learn from and get inspired by. And I promise, what you will find the most is the daily life, the normality and the maybe even a bit boring parts of it. And that is something to explore and might give a more in depth and diverse picture of a continent that is the most diverse and rich in history on this planet.

“The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.”

After a long silent time here in the blog while traveling around in Europe for different assignments, I finally made it back home and it’s time to keep up with the work here as well as with more frequent posts here in the blog.

One of the questions I get asked regularly is what kind of equipment I bring on assignments, so I thought I give you a short introduction. As the equipment for the assignments differs quite a bit and is always related to the needs, this is more to be seen as an example than a final list. The equipment for most documentary is smaller and will fit in small bags, most of the time three lenses at the max. But this will be part of another clip about that. For now this is what I used in Hungary. (…and sorry for not doing the bed.

Full gear list:

Cameras:

Canon 7D

Panasonic GF1

Lenses:

Canon 50mm/1.4

Canon 85mm/1.8

Sigma 10-20mm/4.0-5.6

Tamron 17-50mm/2.8

Panasonic 20mm/1.7

Flash & extras

Canon Speedlite 380ex

Elinchrom Skyport radio transmitters

Mini-Softbox  30cm x 20cm

Sound:

Sennheiser MKE 400

Lavelier mics

Olympus LS-10

Extras:

LCD Viewfinder

Cokin P-series ND Filters ND4 & ND8

Cokin Adapters P-series

Remote Timer N3

Postproduction:

Macbook Pro (2,4GHz, 320GB, 4GB RAM)

Transcend StoreJet (640GB x 2 & 500GB)

iPad 64GB

Lexar Professional UDMA Dual-Slot Card Reader + backup

iPad camerakit

USB cables

Batteries:

Batteries for Canon x 4

AA accus x 8

AAA accus x 4

+ the needed chargers of course

Cards:

Transcend & SanDisk CF cards (16GB, 8GB, 4GB)

Transcend SD cards (16GB, 4GB)

Camera support:

Igus Slider 1meter

Manfrotto Monopod

Silk Tripod

Hague Mini-Motion Steadicam

ICELAND II – Images by Simon Sticker

Why do we do, what we do? What drives us? Where do we wanna go with what we create and share with the world? This is not about a certain style for me, it is more about what i want to tell. So let’s dig a bit into my vision for what i do.

When I started photography almost 15 years ago it became my way to express what i saw and what was important in my life. I never felt so good in words and being a shy kid, photography was a great way to express myself. I saw so many amazing things out there, so many beautiful moments that i wanted to capture them – for me, but also for others to share it with them. What that has to do with my vision?

Photography never was more than a tool for me. A tool that felt natural to me to use. I always felt comfortable with a camera in my hands. It was something what belonged there and felt right. But mainly my motivation was to show what i saw that people could understand it. I never felt as an artist, someone how was creating something new. I was more the one who was recording what i saw and experienced, experimenting with that maybe to some extend. Something what not changed till today.

My vision has nothing to do with a tool or any special form of media i guess. My vision is about expressing something that is so important to me and in my opinion way to often taken for granted. With more or less everything i do i want to create understanding for situations, connect people with what they see and make them feel what the people i show go through or experience. I want to tell stories. And i think that showing just the hard and sad parts of the stories is by far not enough. There is so much beauty in many of the stories and even when it’s about war, poverty or Aids, i feel that there is more to tell. Maybe this is one of the reasons why I like long term or longer term stories, because this projects allow me to dig deep into the story and tell it in a way that goes beyond just one picture of it. I might be emotionally affected by a series of b/w pictures of some refugees in Congo, but do I really understand what it means to live under this circumstances, how they organize themselves or what they have gone through? Aren’t we just seeing what we want to see, when we take this pictures as the one and only reality?

After some time doing all this it became clear to me that what i wanted to do with my work was creating understanding. Understanding for livelihoods, different cultures and situations people live in as i truly believe that in the moment something gets personal and we start to understand what it means, we also hardly can look away so easily. And at the same time I want to do justice to the people I photograph, film or interview. I want people to know that every life has so much beauty and passion and power in it. And every person I met in my life could teach me something, no matter if it was a streetkid in Kenya, a monk in Ladakh or just the guy next door. Maybe that is my motivation for what I do, my vision what i want to achieve with my work and my thoughts how the world could be a better place.

The little piece below is still one of my favorites of what I did. We asked people in Rwanda a bunch of open and easy questions and one of the things I saw in the reactions of people when i was showing it in lectures was that they were surprised how equal wishes, thoughts and needs were to the ones they had. A reaction I was hoping to get. You can find the whole series here.

In the last two weeks in Iceland i had time to think about multimedia and how it is used. One of the thoughts that came to my mind was that the time for multimedia how many photographers see it, will maybe soon be over as long as it is something only web-based. Or maybe over is the wrong word, more that it will need a lot of development to become something what is strong enough to become equally important for reporting than video for instance. Ben at duckrabbit called the audioslideshows, we so much like to call multimedia, recently photofilm, a term that makes it even closer to video, that makes them even more direct competitors of video. But first maybe some words on what i mean when i talk about multimedia as this term is so much fashion and used for more or less everything nowadays. In my point of view (and i guess in the understanding of many photographers) multimedia is the combination of different forms of media in one piece. That could be text, video, photography, audio, graphics, you name it. Each one of those forms of media has advantages and disadvantages so combining this different forms gives us the ability to use the advantages and skip the disadvantages (at least in theory). In a photo-audio-slideshow this concept is not working as it only adds a new form of media, but still has to fight with disadvantages the picture might have in communicating the story. There might be stories where it works (and some of my stories are exactly told like that), but it is not always the best way. Just to keep that in mind. Now, it is for sure difficult to learn all that different forms of media when the only thing you have done before is photography or audio for instance. One important thing for me was to understand that multimedia needs or allows new ways of telling stories, but it needs an deep understanding of each form of media and what is the best way to use it for telling the story. Not easy to say the least as many of us also need the ability to capture the story with this different forms in a compelling way with great pictures, video, audio and so on. So we need this knowledge in the capturing and in the editing of the story.

Why am i now even go further with the headline and state the question: Is multimedia already old? As i said, for most multimedia is a combination of different forms of media at the end combined in a video by using the advantages of the different forms to tell the story in the best way. And here we have an important point: We want to tell a story. And multimedia is right now a web-based way to tell stories. And if done right, it is very powerful, brings us stories closer and more direct. So why do i think it is already old? The web developed a lot in how we use it through social media, web 2.0, however you want to call it. The one-way communication we were used to in the past is here at least getting less and less powerful. When we had before a world of only consuming information/content, we now interact with the content. The easiest expression of that might be comments where ever we look at or the possibility to share more or less everything with other people through Twitter, Facebook & co. But what does that mean for multimedia? Multimedia (always to be seen in the understanding described above) is first of all a linear way of telling stories. Maybe not the story in itself, inside the film, but how it is communicated. It tells the story how the journalist, editor, whoever thought it would be best. He decides where the story starts and ends. But one of the big advantages of the internet is in my opinion that we have so many possibilities to connect content with each other, make people interact with it, share their thoughts, and therefore decide how they approach the stories. As we no longer just watch TV or listen to radio or read newspapers without direct connection (maybe beside reader letters, most of the time without replies) the possibilities of the internet in communicating are massive. My goal for all the stories that I do has always been to tell them in a way that engages the people who see it, makes them understand and connect with the people who’s stories I tell. And with the combination of the different forms of media, it is a first step. Interactivity, in my opinion, will be the next step.

Interactivity truly brings the one who watches out of the passive consuming role into a active role and when it is only about where to start the story, what approach to choose. When that leaves to making comments or sharing it, that is great. Most of the time comments are maybe not important for the content, but they are the result of a thinking process and the creation of a vision. In this case the quality of the comments could also be seen as an indicator how good the project was able to engage and connect people with the story. Interactivity offers us many opportunities. When the journalist was the one who was doing the combination of content and the guiding through the story, maybe now this is something the user is able to do by themselves.

Now, it is nothing new. There are many powerful interactive projects out there and blogs like Innovative Interactivity write about it on and on. But most of this projects are big, long-term projects, flash-based and need a big amount of programing. Nothing what you consum when you are not 100% into the story. Only speaking of myself, i barely made it all the way through one of the features. Even the great ‘Prison Valley’ has a long start film giving you a multiple minute introduction without being visually compelling that makes me want click away after a short time. I think one of the biggest steps sometimes in interactivity is that we have to learn to trust the ones who are interested in the story that they will search for the information themselves as long as you make it easily accessible. And that we have to get away to see interactivity as something what needs this big projects. I think the future will be made with interactive multimedia, done with easy programming, links, lightboxes and so on. It might not look that fancy as this big projects, but it could do the trick and tell exactly the same. Only that it could be done in a short amount of time.

Do i still think multimedia is already old? Maybe not. But there are still a lot of possibilities that will be more and more developed in the future, i guess. Interactivity is just the next step. Something else what we have to learn how it works. What i truly think is that future storytellers will either work in small teams or will be masters of different forms of media. I think we will come away from labels like photojournalist, that is for sure, to something broader. As a little story on that to the end: I was recently asked in a pre-talk for an assignment how i would describe what i do. I thought for some time and said: ‘I tell stories.’ Even when that might not be all, but the rest are mainly tools to do so for me. I got the job right after.

Do you have other opinions or thoughts on the topic? Let me know.

This is the first series i shot in Iceland. As i wrote last week, i’m not really a classic landscape photographer so i tried to take it as a challenge to learn something new about photography and at the same time develop my eye for this way of looking at the world. It is interesting to say the least that it is in many ways equal to reportage/ journalism. You first have to get rid of a lot of pictures in your head before you can create your own personal vision of a place. This was a good reminder as Iceland has been widely photographed and is not poor in powerful nature attractions. But Iceland could also not have made it easier for me as it for sure has some of the most amazing landscapes in the world to offer. So let’s talk landscape photography. Hope you like it.

ICELAND I – Images by Simon Sticker

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.