AUSTIN, TX (August 19,2007) – "I predict that next year when the Women In Photojournalism Conference meets, we'll all be in one room and there won't be separate breakout sessions for still photography and television," video editor and television photojournalist Peg Achterman told the Sunday morning session at the 18th annual gathering. "There won't be any separation between still [photography] and television, because we're all visual storytellers and we're all going to be doing the same kind of storytelling."
It was a theme often repeated throughout the three-day seminar, by still and television photographers alike. Speakers such as Pauline Lubens, a traditional still photographer from the San Jose Mercury News, proved Achterman's point by showing recent major stories she's published that either included video in a mix with still photographs, or were predominately video that incorporated occasional still images, but which all included extensive used of audio.
Photojournalists who made presentations were not only talking about future storytelling, but contemplating how today's technology might have changed work they've already won recognition for doing. April Saul of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Lara Solt of The Dallas Morning News, both commented when showing some of their older projects that they wonder today what those pieces might have been like if they could have included audio, and comments from the stories' subjects, and natural sound or narrative features.
Conference co-chair Tahra Makison-Sanders, of the Santa Rosa (CA) Press Democrat, said that the Women In Photojournalism Conference started 18 years ago (with its inaugural meeting in Austin) "when women photojournalists felt the need for their work to be in the spotlight." Nearly two decades later, with womens' work clearly center stage in mainstream media, the group today is addressing the new evolution in newsrooms that will change the way everyone works, including the tools and methods of storytelling for all visual journalists and the roles of photojournalists' co-workers.
"You're always struggling for legitimacy as a journalist when you're a 'staff photographer,'" Saul said. "But now video is changing some of that, as reporters are having to try to learn to shoot video."
Saul showed her work from a one-year project where she documented every child under 18 years old who was murdered by gunfire in Philadelphia, as it was published in the newspaper as a photography column that appeared after each child's death. The column was called "Kids, Guns and a Deadly Toll" with the sub-heading of "One in an occasional series by Inquirer photographer April Saul." The pieces always had at least one display photograph, sometimes more, along with a portrait of the deceased child and a column reported and written by Saul. The Inquirer is a newspaper where the Guild frequently complained, in the past, about photographers doing writing or reporters doing visual reporting, but Saul said that so many buy-outs, layoffs, and the demise of Knight-Ridder made the union far less apt to complain these days about her performing as a writer.
She started the photo column after covering six days with a woman whose full-time job it is to assist the families of children who are murdered in Philadelphia. There were so many shooting deaths in the handful of days that Saul accompanied her subject that she knew she was onto a deeper story. "I was afraid to go away for even two or three days, because I would miss one," the photojournalist said. Only one of the year's shootings was in the suburbs; the rest were in Philadelphia's traditionally tough neighborhoods where many families and community groups actively fight against gang violence, drugs, and youth crime problems, and where many of the households have lost more than one young child to gun-related deaths.
During a brown-bag lunch session later in the conference, Saul also showed work and talked about a more recent extended project she's shooting on "American Families."
Another one of the conference's speakers talked about the role photography columns play in their daily newspapers. Preston Gannaway of The Concord Monitor showed four of the "Teen Life" photo columns that she authored during the two years that the feature ran in The Monitor, a publication that has become known as a mainstay of outstanding photography and photographic display and page design in the New England community. Stories such as Gannaway's "Remember Me," about a 44-year-old woman with a rare form of liver cancer shot as a traditional picture story as she tried to prepare her three children for the rapidly-approaching day when she would no long be with them, which in the past have been still photographs published in print, may soon transform into multimedia pieces whose primary purpose is for online viewing.
But for now, photographers at The Monitor (led by photography editor Dan Habib), are still succeeding in selling editors on "Day In The Life" packages on personalities, finding it easier to convince managers to "spring us for one day to do a good story," and then having proved with solid images that there's a good story to be had, proving the need to go back and spend more time, shoot more photographs, and develop a deeper essay.
This approach has led Gannaway to finish a picture story on a high school wrestling team, and an extended essay following a second grade class called "How Time Slips Away" that ran as a four-part series and looked at how little time teachers actually have to reach, and teach, students with important lessons and skills. Gannaway also talked about how a Web site, www.photocolumn.org, has served as a resource for her as The Monitor launched their new effort.
After showing some of her older work shot when she was with the Detroit Free Press, Lubens rhetorically asked the audience to consider what the essays "could have been like if they had included audio, and video, and the voices of the subjects." The two older stories were about the "Right To Die" issue that was a hot topic in Michigan for politicians, medical personnel, and those who wanted to assert their right to have a say in when, and how, they died.
Lubens said that back then, as she does now, she "looks for people whose stories breathe life into statistics, and to do stories that reflect what's really going on." In that spirit she showed new work she's done at the Mercury News that included an extended essay, published in chapters, about soldier Frank Sandoval and the traumatic brain injury he received in the war in Iraq, and the long period of recovery he struggled with before a fairly routine neurosurgery to replace part of his missing skull cap ended with Sandoval in a sudden coma then dying. "Frank Sandoval: A Survival Story" by Lubens includes all the tools of multimedia storytelling. Lubens also encourage the audience to see other new multimedia stories the Mercury News has published on the photograph department's own Web site, http://mercurynewsphoto.com.
In addition to her prediction that still photographers and television photographers will all be doing like-minded storytelling in the near future, Achterman was joined by Karen LaFleur of NBC to talk about what's happening in today's newsrooms and the technological and ethical challenges photojournalists will be dealing with shortly, if not already.
The ethics discussion centered around a new visual ethics policy distributed to all Tribune Company outlets. Parts of the policy highlighted by Achterman for discussion included: "It is unacceptable to ask a subject to act out for our cameras because those images would present a contrived, dishonest situation"; and "bring out the most thorough and truthful account of each situation, keeping in mind accuracy, clarity and storytelling elements." The part of the policy addressing "acting out" for cameras included a look at what television photographers often refer to as "the walking shot," where a subject is asked to walk up or down a hallway, or street, for "B-Roll." The discussion asked whether the "walking shot" was television's equivalent to newspaper and magazines' "environmental portrait," which can be argued to be as equally contrived (except that television has no easy way to label a shot "an illustration" in a way that the viewer knows it immediately, as they can do in print).
The policy acknowledged that most journalists are in agreement on these ethical terms: do no harm; staging is wrong; do not "Photoshop" anything in or out [of an image]; and don't use sound that is not present at the event.
Melissa Lyttle of the St. Petersburg Times told attendees about how "A Photo A Day" was born out of the frustration of not being able to get some of her favorite photographs into print, and how the notion was quickly embraced by other APAD participants who faced similar frustrations at their newspapers. She also talked about how to alleviate some of the frustration of newspapers' inherent problems by seeking self satisfaction in photography, quoting David Alan Harvey's philosophy of "giving yourself the choice assignment you've always dreamed of someone else giving you." Lyttle said the biggest complaint she consistently hears from young photojournalists is about the poor quality of the photographic assignments they're given by newspaper editors. "Make them better by giving yourself better assignments," she said.
Event organizers said part of the money raised by Saturday night's auction of donated prints during the "Expanding Our Visions" gallery opening will be donated to a medical fund for VII photojournalist Alexandra Boulat, who remains in a coma in a Paris neurosurgical hospital.
Read an earlier story about the conference
