NORTH LITTLE ROCK, AR (October 21, 2006) – At the second stop of NPPA's 49th annual Flying Short Course, today's speakers echoed the resounding theme that photojournalism is rapidly changing, and addressed the fact that many newspapers are now pushing still photographers to shoot video and publish it on the Web, sometimes before they're really ready to take on video reportage.
"The push is moving us into an area that many are not really prepared for," Michel duCille of The Washington Post said today at Pulaski Technical College in North Little Rock. "But we need to back up a little bit and not panic, and look at how a picture story is constructed, regardless of whether you're using a pin-hole camera or a film camera or a video camera. There are building blocks to constructing stories that are needed, and we need to take a minute to just review the basics." He emphasized the fact that good storytelling skills are basically the same, regardless of the medium, and that photojournalists should rely on mastering those basic skills and employ them, learning what they need to learn about the new tools (whether it's video, audio, or building slideshows in Flash).
Colin Mulvany spent the first 17 years of his photojournalism career at The Spokesman-Review documenting the community with still photographs. Today his print editors have blessed Mulvany’s new passion for pursuing storytelling with a video camera. He told the FSC audience that after years of being at the newspaper he felt the need to re-examine his work, and the newspaper was pushing for more video. Realizing the publishing world was shifting and that video is not the future, but it’s today, they agreed to send him to the Platypus workshop.
Mulvany said that after the workshop he created videos, and when his bosses saw them he was quickly made responsible for that part of his newspaper’s efforts. Knowing he needed more equipment to create a highly productive group, he made a video presentation to the editors. They, in turn, enthusiastically sent him to the publisher. The result? Mulvany was given a check for $20,000 to fund the venture.
Photography curator and author Marianne Fulton was in the FSC audience in North Little Rock and she recounted Mulvany’s presentation. “It’s always inspiring to see excellent work whether still or video. Colin, however, surpassed even this with a professional presentation that was truly exciting,” Fulton said. “Between stories about his experience at the Platypus workshop (“It changed my life”) and powerful 3-minute videos that had both humorous and poignant moments, he made important points.
“One video concerned a completely unplanned look at a street preacher. Mulvany discovered a man emphatically reassuring passersby of God’s love for them. The preacher had on a cheap stocking cap on, few teeth and an erratic manner. One drew conclusions about him. Then, the camera discovered a young woman crying in the background who explained that she had recently become homeless. The preacher’s message gave her hope. This scene was the climax. Then an older woman approached. This joyous person turned out to be the preacher’s wife of many years. The video ended with loving banter between them—then they walked away arm in arm. One realized that the man had been transformed through time and editing.”
Josh Meltzer of The Roanoke Times also talked about changes that are taking place in newspaper photojournalism. "The way you make change at your newspaper is to be a good journalist. By coming up with story ideas, not only on breaking news but on news and feature beats, the photography department can establish its credibility in the newsroom. Before, we were shooting a lot of portraits because we weren't doing our own reporting and we weren't in control of what we did." Meltzer also talked about ways to take national and international news stories, and new government polices and developments, and localize them in community stories in any newspaper's hometown.
Meltzer is the NPPA Best of Photojournalism Photojournalist of the Year for smaller markets, and he was this year's opening FSC speaker. He also showed and talked about "Sporting Life," a Sports section second page feature in the Times that the photographers are responsible for shooting and writing. It also has an online audio component that accompanies the feature as it's published on the newspaper's Web site.
Meltzer talked about the choice he makes about when to shoot and when to gather audio. "I'm a photographer first, so I think about what I really want to shoot, and then I gather audio." He tries not to shoot and gather audio at the same time. "When you do, you're really sacrificing both," he said. "What I love about what I do is that it's a great mix," Meltzer said. "There are great pictures to be had, if you're there."
An editor who certainly knows great pictures is John G. Morris. "The White House, under every president, has tried to use photographs for their own purposes. It would be my hope that photojournalism today would be used to propagandize for peace, and not to propagandize for war," Morris told the Flying Short Course audience. The retired photography editor of The New York Times and the former executive editor of Magnum Photos, who was also a picture editor and correspondent for Life magazine in its heyday, Morris spoke about the history of photojournalism, politics, and war as it relates to the White House and the presidency. "It's crucially important how we get our information about the highest levels of government," he said. "We may never get pictures of the highest level of the judicial branch, even though the NPPA has fought valiantly for photography in the courtroom for many years."
A man who has lived under 16 U.S. presidents, Morris traced the history of photojournalism surrounding American presidents and war from Woodrow Wilson's second term through the current administration of George W. Bush. "Lyndon Johnson's photographer (Yoichi Okamoto) was the first one to photograph what was really going on, behind the scenes, with total access, in candid and un-posed pictures that were real," Morris said. "It was the first indication of what role photography could play in the White House."
He also spoke about being Robert Capa's picture editor for the invasion of Normandy on World War II's D-Day, June 6,1946. Morris recounted how Capa's 35mm film from D-Day was ruined, all but 11 frames, by a young lab technician who was "rush" developing the film and overheated it in a film drying cabinet. The smeared emulsion on three of the four rolls gave the surviving images a blurry, other-worldly appearance.
Morris debunked the persistent myth that the lab technician responsible for the botched film was a youthful Larry Burrows (who later became a famous Life photographer himself). Morris says the young lab tech was a man named Dennis Banks.
A two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning shooter at The Miami Herald who spent 17 years as The Washington Post's picture editor, Michel duCille opened his Flying Short Course presentation with a quote from William Faulkner: "Always dream and shoot higher than you know how to. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself."
He used the quote as a window into telling the story of how he decided to leave the picture desk and to be a photojournalist again, and about how happy he was to find himself behind a camera in the Sudan only two weeks after his "going away" party at the Post. The photographer shared some of the work he's done since returning to the camera, including daily Metro work alongside his essays from Sierra Leone and southern Sudan, including "Sudanese Cattle Camp," "Famine in Niger," and "Funeral of a Rebel Leader."
Gail Fisher, a senior projects editor at the Los Angles Times, talked about the anatomy of a large project and about how all the components come together in print and on the Web – and maybe even video for television broadcast. She described how she does a "wider" edit of still photographs for the Web while reading rough drafts of the stories and how they're going to break down, in outlines, to know where the story's going, before they start building audio tracks. Thinking about the narration, the "A" roll and "B" roll of the photographs, Fisher says she moves pictures around to include openers, transition pictures, and the closing shots. Separately, she works on editing the video components and working closely with the other editors, who know that it's important for her to be reading the writers' drafts, and the designers.
"Newspapers aren't dead. They're just evolving," Fisher said. "It used to be that all you needed to be was a great photojournalist to get a job at a newspaper. Now you have to be a great photojournalist, and be able to gather audio, and now maybe shoot video."
Fisher showed four Times projects: The Vanishing Class (about what happens to kids who drop out of school and don't make it to graduation); The New Foreign Aid (a look at of illegal immigrant workers who send money from their first world jobs home to their third world families); The Lifeline (how medical technology is being used in Iraq to save lives on the battlefield); and Altered Oceans (how runoff from the modern world is changing the oceans and creating new illnesses).
Associated Press photojournalist David Guttenfelder said the reason he went into photojournalism was because "I had something I wanted to say about the world. But I didn't really know how to do that, I didn't have the tools yet to do that," he said today, recalling his beginning days as a photographer at a small newspaper in Iowa City. Guttenfelder is the 2006 NPPA Best Of Photojournalism Photojournalist of the Year for larger markets. At the Flying Short Course today he told the audience about how he was working at a small newspaper in Iowa after college when he saw television news stories about refugees in Rawanda. "And I knew that was the kind of story that I wanted to do."
At 24, he quit his job, took his savings, packed his backpack, and headed to Africa "to do the kind of stories that I wanted to do. I told myself I'd give myself a year to prove myself. That was 12 years ago, and I haven't come back yet," Guttenfelder said today.
"Photojournalism is a difficult profession at times, and sometimes it's a morally confusing profession (like in combat zones, where people have been injured, or at an earthquake, where people are digging people out)," he said. "You surprise yourself a lot, and sometimes you disappoint yourself a lot, in those situations. I don't want to discourage anyone from doing what I do. I think what I do is interesting and important, but I do think you should know that it is often difficult, and it can drive a wedge between you and the people that you have relationships with, between you and your family. But if you're going to do this, pick a story that means something to you, and pick a story about which you have something to say. If you don't, if you're not committed to it, it'll probably be too difficult and you'll likely give up."
College and high school students at the North Little Rock stop took advantage of portfolio review sessions in the late afternoon when the national FSC faculty left to fly to Cal-State Fullerton for Sunday's stop, and on Saturday evening the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette hosted a reception for the FSC at the Clinton Presidential Library, including free tours of the facility.
Marianne Fulton contributed to this story.
Read an earlier story and the speakers' biographies here.
