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

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:

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.

Recently, when I had Benjamin Chesterton of duckrabbit fame back in Copenhagen for a visit, we had a long talk about what drives photography in the photojournalism biz (You can hear a bit of it in the Skype talk we had a week later here). Aesthetics are for sure one of the driving forces in photography. And it is also alright, but the question is more, what comes first. What is more important to you? The story you want to tell or your aesthetic expression of it? The artist or the subject?

A lot of photographers I know, tell me that they love photography and are not so interested in other forms of media like audio and video for instance. Also that is alright of course, but talking about my own motivation, I use these forms not first, because I’m interested in them, but because they allow me in certain stories just another, sometimes better way to tell the story. Take a story like the one of Clotide, only the combination of the different forms give you the depth the story deserves. The pictures might tell a good part, but they are capturing the moment, not the history. The audio gives another layer to it and the video as well. So we get more of the story. So that was in this case the main reason for recording the story in that way.

But what has that to do with the aesthetics? In this example the story came first, the use of media and also the use of visual language, aesthetics came second to find a way to tell the story in the best way I could do. But what would have happened if I would have put the aesthetics first? I would used maybe a certain style that I like, like always open aperture or everything with 1/4 of a second to get things blurred moving or I would have thought of some series to do, like portraits at any place that is important to her. Light, lines, shapes would have maybe become more important than what we see in the pictures. I would have way more been on a track to actually create art and not tell a story. That does not mean that aesthetics are not important, but I think we should think more of what we want to tell rather than how we could make a compelling picture. The compelling picture is for the ego first, the story is about the person, not about us.

I remember one day in this old school in Rwanda where during the genocide 50.000 people were killed. Part of the dead bodies are conserved in the rooms and I was there to take photographs. A horrific place and the purpose of taking pictures was the only thing that kept me from emotionally breaking down while I was there. Later I was looking at the pictures and it striked me that some of them had this powerful aesthetics in it, what I loved at that time. Today I look at them and I’m not sure if I did a good job. Aesthetically, ya, maybe, but did I tell the story properly? I’m not sure. Another picture is nothing less than a lie for me today. There is nothing staged or so, but it is a lie, because of where it takes people that look at it. While I was in one of the rooms, I saw this big dirty part on the wall (no painting or something like that) that looked a bit like Africa in it’s form. With the head of one of the bodies in the foreground, a picture would create a powerful connection and tell a story. I was fascinated by that at the time. Easy to tell, easy to understand. But what I created was a stereotypical lie about Africa and the perception of the continent in the western world. It is just another excuse to make it easy to see no need to learn and understand more of the continent or ask.

This example is not only about aesthetics, but about how easy it could be to be driven to simplify or even lie with your pictures, when it makes a compelling image. There are thousands of examples for that out there, especially from the developing world. But isn’t it time to move on from that? Photojournalism is full of those lies and it does not have to be staged or over-photoshopped to make aesthetics taking the lead over the story or to tell lies in the worst case. Photography is highly subjective, but that is why a business like photojournalism can only can only be important in any way when integrity and the story comes first and is what drives the aesthetics. As long as we celebrate “style over substance” as Benjamin called it, we are moving photojournalism into art galleries and make it a club for itself, but with no further value for someone who is not interested in photography but in pictures as a form of communication as the pictures don’t tell me enough or something new. They just encourage to keep the relaxed picture in black and white of the developing world and don’t start thinking further or even ask questions.

The story I want to share with you today here on the blog is one I was looking forward to for some time. Dalia Khamissy is working since some years now on the story of more than 17.000 people kidnapped in the Lebanon civil war and never seen again since than. This story catched the attention of Benjamin Chesterton (you might want to listen to the interview with him here) of duckrabbit (do you know their blog?) and he made this story a first in a new series called ‘Open Eye’ for the BBC World Service. While in Copenhagen Benjamin told me a bit about the story, so I was stoked to hear that it was released a few days ago. They produced not only a radio documentary (what you can listen to here), but also a photofilm with Dalia’s powerful pictures and some fresh video content.

What makes this new series a great thing in itself is that it will empower photographers that work on important stories, but way too often without the chance to reach a bigger audience, to bring the stories to a audience of millions. The next in the series will be the story from Malmo produced together with photographer Joseph Rodriguez on islamic youth in Sweden, that is supposed to be online in the next days.

But back for a second to the photofilm ‘Lebanon’s Missing’. When you are familiar with the work of duckrabbit you might see a new step to video, what is in my opinion an important third layer that adds a lot to the story in it’s depth after photography and audio. I also think it works fine to use the video mainly as this third layer that is not in sync with the audio. It adds a certain form of emotion that in a classical use would maybe not have been created. The start of the photofilm might be a bit to long with a bit too much of titles and it needs a bit of time to really dive into the film, but that might just be my taste. Would be interesting to hear other thoughts on that. That the whole story is dubbed let’s me miss sometimes the voices of the subjects, but after last weeks story by Bombay FC where I was discussing the same topic the other way round, it is an example that shows how difficult it is to make a decision in either subtitles or dubbing the voices. Important here is to mention that the voice-over is really well made and shows a lot of Benjamin’s skills as a radio producer.

But enough of thoughts on the production, let’s focus on the story again. Here is ‘Lebanon’s Missing’, not to be missed. Let’s hope we will see more collaborations like that in the future.

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

One of the questions i get asked from time to time is how time consuming it is to produce audioslideshows and what it all needs to produce them. People start asking me about Final Cut, Photoshop, complex audioediting. And for sure for a big audioslideshow, especially when you combine it with video and so on as well, it needs some time to edit it as the editing process is going through different layers of editing. The question is way more, is it possible to create audioslideshows that are visually compelling, tell a clear story (also without a narrator, what would make editing even faster) and are produced in a short amount of time.

When the audioslideshows want to get a place beside video on the news websites and step out of the ‘only’ bigger storylines producing photofilms, we need to think about that. So what do we need? We need a set of pictures, audio with both ambient sound and an interview. That is mainly it. For the editing we can use some easy available tools like the widespread Lightroom or if you want to make it even more easy and cheesy do the colorgrading in iMovie or what you use for editing the final film. The audiotracks can be edited quite fast in programs like Audacity and here we go. What are the advantages of this scenario? First, no big investment if you are new to audioslideshows as the programs are free or preinstalled on most computers (putting aside Lightroom or Photoshop, what at least most photographers use). Second, especially iMovie is the perfect program for editing audioslideshows as you seldom need all the fancy features of Final Cut and the likes, but iMovie also allows you very fast editing with it’s interface. Audacity is quite similar in simplicity, but having everything you need. This is not to be meant as a tutorial or something, but to think differently of audioslideshows. Is it even possible to create also for news topics a higher value with transmitting a set of pictures, plus directly also an audioslideshow an hour later? Or if you are a NGO worker who wants to give a quick update on your project? You have the value of the pictures, but also the extra value of the multimedia.

The guys from duckrabbit are in Nairobi right now for teaching NGOs in creating audioslideshows and they made a little quick and dirty example for a photofilm that perfectly shows what I was talking about before. Total production time: 7 hours (with handshaking, laughters and editing). I think this is at least a direction where we should look at, or what do you think?

The first time I saw this interview with Stephen Mayes, director of the VII agency, he hit quite some spots inside of me where i have been thinking about for a while. It is more or less an interview about the future of photojournalism and the ways how VII is approaching it and how the whole economy changed.

The very first thing he says is that one of the biggest traps of photojournalism is to think about it as a format. By doing so, we limit ourselves, how far we push it, i guess, so it is good to think outside the box. One of the reasons i define myself very seldom by the media format i use to tell the stories.

VII started an online magazine a while ago and one for me very interesting aspect of it is that it is not selling something directly, but that he says, it is creating value in the way that it is allowing the photographers to tell their stories more deeply and in that way showing the photographers voice. In the same way Panos agency for instance is using multimedia to promote the work of the photographers on their site.

He is also talking about the magazines and one of the important sentences for me is that they are not important as clients anymore, but still important as a distribution partner. A major shift that also shows that there are thousands of different formats today as well to distribute and also make money out of it. Thinking of transmedia, where he is also talking about in the interview.

He also sees a role change for the photographers from suppliers to publishers, what is also really important to think about. How can we reach a dedicated audience with the stories? How can we develop new models out of that. A classic example where this role changed is music industry or also DVDs where the digital downloads are taking away the middle part, the shop, but instead have a direct communication/ selling from producer to user at least as a possibility.

At the end he is talking about what he thinks is needed nowadays to work as a photographer and interesting enough he is not talking about taking good pictures (what is still an important part, i guess…), but about how important it is to have something to say, having a brand and good imagination how to tell it. He believes that taking pictures to make money as your first goal is nothing what will bring you success. Earlier he defines the product he sells with VII also not as the photographs, but the credibility of the photographers.

At the end, we all want to tell stories i guess and we want to do that in the best way, so i wonder why do we limit our selves to one form of media and not explore what is possible?

Anyway, make sure to listen to this interview below (what is part of a great series you can find here).