I remember back in the days of my first photojournalism job at the (now defunct) Nanaimo Times I would spend hours a week in a darkroom, working with toxic chemicals to process photos for the next edition. Now with the advent of new media, not only do I not have to inhale fixer (or try to wash the smell from my hands), but I can add other multimedia elements to my photography projects. Recently I have been working with the Adobe application After Effects, and using the Ken Burn’s Effect to animate still photos to sound in order to tell old stories in a new way.
One journalist using these new tools to great advantage is Globe and Mail photographer John Lehmann, who uses a mix of uses of video, stills, soundcape and interviews in stories ranging from the tragic, such as Man Behind the Log, about a homeless soapstone carver sleeping on the beach, to the more lighthearted, such as Barely Bowling, with its look at nude bowling nights.
Magnum photographer Jonas Bendiksen uses stills and soundscapes/interviews to tell the stories of slumdwellers in Caracas, Mumbai, Nairobi, and Jakarta in The Places We Live, which also has book and exhibition components. The website excels at transitions – from scenes of the outside slum (with accompanying city noise) – to the inside, family stories, told in their voices.
But it isn’t the death of ‘static’ photography online. One of the web’s most interesting photo sites is Boston.com’s Big Picture, which showcases the best photos from the news wires for display in a large-format (990 pixels wide) photo blog, with the pictures placed vertically for ease of viewing. Simple yet brilliant.
A recent twitter post by kk that linked to the 2008 Greek riots got me hooked on this site’s large-scale format – these amazing photos need to run this large to capture the drama of the events there.
