livebooks blog

Pronghorn antelope in western Wyoming.

Name: Joe Riis
Website: www.joeriis.com
Age: 25
Location: Moose, Wyoming right now and moving to Bijou Hills, South Dakota, early in 2010. I want to live in a cabin on the prairie.
Full-time job: Wildlife photographer and videographer

Personal project name and short description
Pronghorn Passage, a conservation photography project that focuses on the Grand Teton National Park pronghorn migration. Each fall a herd of 400 pronghorn antelope migrate from Grand Teton National Park down into the Upper Green River Basin of Wyoming, a total round-trip journey of 300 miles. This migration is the second longest overland mammal migration in the western hemisphere (after caribou in Alaska). The migration corridor is being squeezed down by residential development and mineral extraction on the private and public lands that it crosses. Pronghorn Passage is a collaborative project between myself and essayist Emilene Ostlind.

When and why did you start it?
The project was actually Emilene’s idea; she approached me and wanted to work together. She is a writer, and was just finishing up working at National Geographic Magazine and as Steve Winter’s assistant on his snow leopard story in India. She was coming back home to Wyoming to write a selection of essays about the pronghorn migration and wanted me to photograph it. At the time, I was just finishing up a 2-year conservation photography project on environmental threats to the Missouri River. I was ready to start photographing something new, and the pronghorn project, which had never been photographed before, seemed like a great idea.

I started researching and filling out grant applications in November 2007, and started my fieldwork in May 2008, the day after I graduated from the University of Wyoming with a bachelor’s in Wildlife Biology. We got the project fully funded through the National Geographic Expeditions Council, The Banff Centre, University of Wyoming, North American Nature Photographers Association, Grand Teton National Park, and Patagonia the clothing company. I feel very fortunate to have received so much financial backing for the project, which has allowed me to focus all my efforts on fieldwork.

I am still surprised by the support we got, but the bottom line is that the pronghorn story had all the elements to a good wildlife story. A small herd of pronghorn migrating a super long distance over an incredible landscape, under threat, that had never been photographed before — plus we were two young Wyomingites who wanted to live with pronghorn. The reason is hadn’t been photographed before is because it takes a huge time commitment, at least a full year. No one knew exactly where they were migrating so I had to do field biology before I could photograph it. Because most of my work is by camera trap, I have to know exactly where the animals are moving.

Do you have a particular image you are especially drawn to so far? More »

I’m writing this from a small hotel in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where duckrabbit and the Bangladeshi photographer Sheikh Rajibul Islam have been working on a documentary about the effects of climate change on this beautiful country.

If the scientists’ predictions are right, up to 20 million Bangladeshi’s will become environmental refugees in the next 50 years. There is no bigger long-term story than the havoc man is wreaking on nature.

It would be easy for us at duckrabbit to reduce our stories about Bangladesh to the most brutal, the most shocking. This is always a temptation for photojournalists looking for the money shot, for their World Press award, but it’s a cheap and ultimately destructive way to capture the world because it reduces people to the status of victims.

At the BBC I used to produce Costing The Earth, their flagship environmental documentary programme. We always strived to tell a balanced story, beyond emotion, because understanding is more important than shock, and debate is more powerful than bashing someone over the head with a message.

Adam Westbrook, a multimedia journalist and blogger, expressed this point brilliantly in a post about a controversial video advertisement by the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontieres:

“We want true stories, and we want them as gritty as the real world is. But we also want balance — and we recognize a third-world-cliché when we see it.”

There are plenty of weak multimedia pieces about the environment out there that suffer from the same clichéd black-and-white photography and lack of balance in their storytelling, but let’s not blow any more CO2 on their two-dimensional approach. Instead I want to point you to a visually stunning and deeply thoughtful piece of work by Toronto Star photographer Lucas Oleniuk.

Airsick: An Industrial Devolution is designed to persuade us that the earth is slowly drowning in CO2. Part of why it works so well is that, instead of focusing on apocalyptic images of the developing world, the piece is rooted in the familiar, in the industrialized world. I can’t watch this and not feel part of the problem. That is powerful multimedia.

(duckrabbit would like to thank the CBA for funding their recent Bangladesh trip.)

One of the best parts of my job is hanging out and talking with photographers — about photography, but also about the shifting media landscape, companies that are trying cool new things, technology that makes our life more efficient yet more complicated, and, of course, art of all kinds that inspires us.

That’s what I was doing yesterday (Sunday) in Union Square Park near our liveBooks office in San Francisco. If you don’t know Mark, check out his popular site, blog, and Facebook and Twitter streams. If you do know Mark, you’re probably not surprised that he asked to do a quick iPhone video while we were talking. I thought I should Flip video him at the same time — hope you enjoy the result as much as we did.

After that we headed to the office to talk some more and Mark made a video of me talking about RESOLVE a little more in depth. At lunch we were discussing how hard (but necessary) it is for photographers to stop focusing solely on the value of their images — today much more value is placed on education, audience engagement, and especially storytelling, as Mark explained and I asked him to rehash for the Flip.

Mark and I had not met before yesterday, so it was a pleasure to find out he is just as kind, helpful, and well-informed as his online presence suggests.

I also hung out with two innovators I’ve known for a bit longer on Saturday: David Alan Harvey, who has very exciting things in store for burn, his online photography magazine; and Phil Toledano, who I was ecstatic to hear has found a publisher for his Days With My Father project. Finally, here are few of the funner things Mark and I chatted about:

• The Photographer: A graphic novel that tells the story of photojournalist Didier Lefévre entering Afghanistan in 1986 and incorporating hundreds of his black-and-white photographs from the trip.
• Closer: Elinor Carucci’s stunning book, which was recently re-released (and happens to be sitting in my cubicle.)
• Thousand Journals: A project that sent 1,000 blank journals out into the world, asking people to add to them and then pass them along. They are tracked at this website.
• Time Code: A 2000 film directed by Mike Figgis that consists of four simultaneous movies played in a grid.
• Radio Lab – Moments: An attempt by WNYC’s brilliant science-based radio show to visually capture the idea of a “moment.“

Gene Higa is a destination wedding photographer based in San Francisco, but he’s got great tips for all kinds of photographers. In today’s Tip of the Week, Gene reminds photographers how important it is to meet new people and that helping others always pays off in the long run.

“How do you get someone’s attention and keep it?”