livebooks blog

A lone farmer rides his tractor through a small rural village. ©Sean Gallagher. Courtesy Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting

During my 1-year paid internship at Magnum Photos London in 2004-5, the then deputy director Hamish Crooks gave me and fellow interns some simple yet important advice on how to find newsworthy stories. “Pick up a newspaper and read.”

Hamish encouraged us to devour headlines to understand why people care enough about an issue to report on it. He also advised us to find topics we were passionate about on a personal level, rather than simply covering issues we were “expected” to cover. From that point on, I started to read news in a different way — always assessing its visual potential and gauging my own interest in the subject matter.

In the summer of 2007 I came across the subject of desertification in a news article. Images of villages and towns being swallowed by slowly moving sand dunes filled my mind. I imagined cracked earth in drought-stricken regions and intense sandstorms blocking out the sun. When you first consider covering an issue, it is inevitable that you conjure images that represent your preconceptions about it. Some turn out to be true, others don’t. One of the challenges of reporting on a subject is to confront your preconceptions and free yourself from them.

I began my work on desertification in western China by taking two weeks to gauge the potential for this story. At the beginning of 2008 I received the first David Alan Harvey Fund for Emerging Photographers, which helped me continue this work and also look at other environmental issues in Asia. As I continued the desertification story, I started to look for other sources of funding to help me continue the work and enable me to push even deeper into the subject matter. This is when I discovered the work of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and their travel grants to cover under-reported issues, which I felt desertification definitely was.

Application for the Pulitzer Center grant involved writing a detailed project proposal and outlining logistical and financial planning for the entirety of the proposed project. My project also had to fall in line with the Pulitzer Center’s focus on, “enterprising reporting projects throughout the world with an emphasis on issues that are under-reported, mis-reported, or not reported on at all.” Even though I had first read desertification in an international publication, and had seen work on the same subject by other photographers, I still believed it was a vastly under-reported issue and deserved more attention.

In February of 2009 I received an email from Nathlaie Applewhite, the Associate Director of the Pulitzer Center, informing me that my application for the grant had been successful. At that point I began my preparations and logistical planning for 6-weeks on the road. Needless to say, there was a lot to do!

Soul Of Athens 2009 Trailer from AthensHasSoul on Vimeo.

Miki Johnson: Tell me about the goals of the Soul of Athens project.

Jenn Poggi: One of our fundamental goals is to replicate the editorial experience, whether it’s in the newsroom or whether it’s in a more corporate setting where you’re producing a product. It’s not just about that final product; it’s also about taking a group of people, bringing them together, and going through the process together.

The other obvious goal is to examine the soul or makeup of this unique community. We have to ask ourselves, what kind of preconceived notions do we come to the project with? How are we going to shape this project or allow it to be shaped? And how are we going to present different materials in a manner that’s approachable for the audience?

This year we have broadened the kind of content that’s being presented on the site. There have been pieces besides audio/video and still photography presented in the past, like the first year there was a Second Life component. But this year we are doing it in a more inclusive way. We have several interactive informational graphics; we have written pieces. Sometimes several assets are being packaged to address a specific topic. For example, a piece on drilling oil in Ohio has an informational graphic with it, as well as multi-media still photography video presentations.

The team is also thinking about how to present this material and cross-promote it, so there are more ways to search and access the different pieces that exist. That’s one thing that the news industry is getting better at, but there are still many publications that produce a huge project and a few days after it’s posted, it disappears because it’s not re-promoted or cross-promoted.

MJ: How are the students who work on the project chosen and organized?

JP: The first year, Soul of Athens was produced by a relatively small group, the brainchild of a couple of very talented people. Now it’s grown into this institutional project, with a class in the spring quarter. We meet once a week, as if it were an editorial budget meeting in a newsroom. The team of senior producers had been meeting earlier and we had students present a resume and cover letter about their skills and what they’d like to focus on: producing, content creation, development. We tried to pull in people from all majors — information graphic people, designers, still photographers, videographers, sound people, developers, and coders.

MJ: Regarding multimedia, how do you decide where it works and where it doesn’t, when to do audio or video?

JP: First we created a list of all the different story pitches the students made. Then each senior producer went down the list and grabbed several ideas to help shepherd. Each senior producer met with their team to understand their stories and what particular skill sets each person had.

Now that we’re approaching our launch date, as the content is being brought to final production, we are going back and reviewing each of the pieces as a group and deciding what’s a good mix — of topics, storytelling techniques, and assets. With a complicated project like this, you never sit down, hand out a series of deadlines, and say, we need this many people, these pieces of content. It’s not a scientific equation. It’s constantly evolving. When you’re passionate about what you’re doing, there’s always gonna be a little chaos during that final crunch time. You just have to be able to change on the fly and stay fluid through those moments of chaos.

MJ: How did you think about synthesizing everything together and how people would move through the site?

Soul of Athens Senior Producer Carrie Pratt troubleshoots a quandary with the website.

JP: People were working on design ideas at the same time we were coming up with content. In a perfect world, you would assemble all of the content, then look at it and figure out what’s the best way to present that. But we work like we would in a newsrooms, where lots of these things have to happen simultaneously.

The designers made pitches on how they envisioned the Soul of Athens site coming together. One group of people investigated the texture of this community. What do we see in our environment, both man-made natural? Another team talked about the sounds that are happening around us. Designers also had to consider how to present information in a way that fulfills the basic requirements of good navigation.

We culled the initial pitches down to three, which were presented to the whole group. The class as a whole voted on what direction to take. I think in the newsroom setting, because of time constraints, which are worse than ever, this planning part of the process often gets left out — but it’s so important.

MJ: You mentioned that you have people specifically dedicated to promoting Soul of Athens. What have they been doing?

JP: We’re creating some pre-launch energy with things like a trailer video (above). We looked at places that covered Soul of Athens in the past, as well as places that haven’t. Then we looked at new things that have developed this year, like Multimedia Muse, that are really highlighting great work.

At the local level, we’re making t-shirts for the team; we’re chalking up the sidewalks around the community; we’re plastering Post-Its with a slogan and logo around town. There’s a Facebook page and a Twitter feed. There was also a postcard campaign where postcards were created inviting members of the community to contribute their ideas about what the Soul of Athens is. They could write or draw something, then drop it in a post box and have them sent back to us here on campus. Eventually that will become it’s own piece of content on the website.

For a longer interview from Gray, check out this podcast from F-Stop Beyond.

Carmen Suen: You say that you are not a photographer, but an artist. What do you think is the difference?

Gray Scott: Obviously, photography is my medium now, but I didn’t start as a photographer. I actually started as a painter. My background is oil painting. I come from a very trained, technical background. Using the medium of photography has been really interesting for me because it’s faster. It’s immediate gratification.

I’m actually starting to realize now that the concepts that I have in my fine-arts series are very similar to if I were to go back to painting, or do both — that’s always a possibility, for me to do both, they would probably be very similar.

I’m interested in the human form. I’m interested in psychology, mythology, icons, symbology, and all of that. I guess for me, it’s just a difference in medium choice. I’m technically a photographer by trade, but in the scheme of things, the entirety of my work, I feel like I’m an artist.

You can see from my work that I’m not just taking pretty pictures. There is subtext to my pictures. And I’m hoping to push that further with a new series of fine-art photography that I’m working on. I’m hoping to push that to an even more aggressive place. Hopefully in six months to a year, I’ll be able to produce that.

An image in Gray's new series of work ©Gray Scott Studio

CS: Could you tell us about your fondness for contrasts?

GS: I like polarity. Hot and cold; good and bad. I like switching things around and pushing polarities around. I have a new piece in my latest promotion campaign that is a good example to explain that.

In the picture [above], the woman is the executioner. You seldom see women in that role. And when you look at the man in that picture, he’s naked and vulnerable. But she’s also exposing herself. To me, it seems that in our culture, for a woman to be that aggressive, she has to bare everything. She has to expose her entire self. Whereas men don’t have to do this. Men could just be aggressive without being exposed.

CS: When you want to refocus yourself, you’ve said you like to read art books. What kind?

GS: I read a variety of books, but I go to Caravaggio all the time. I think the reason I like Caravaggio so much is the drama in his paintings. The characters in his work are always in some sort of trouble. They’re either being executed or suffering. It’s not just a pretty picture. They’re actually going through some traumatic or beautiful experience.

Outside of art books, I read a lot of psychology. And I also like to read Aldous Huxley because he has such a dimension to his work. Some people would call him jaded, but I would say he is indifferent to people’s false morality, which I really enjoy. I think for any young photographers, their work is going to be stronger if they have some stories to tell.

David White: Innocence, duckrabbit’s feature about child soldiers in Sri Lanka, just sort of emerged organically. I shot the photographs a few years ago now, whilst there was still a ceasefire. It was a very difficult and at times dangerous job, but one that I desperately hoped might make a tiny difference.

Recently I was sitting up very early in the morning when I saw a report on the news about the escalation of the war in Sri Lanka. I just started to write about how that made me feel. For once I was not worried about how other people would interpret and dissect my thoughts — I just needed to get my feelings out.

I posted my thoughts on the duckrabbit blog, and from there Benjamin picked up the baton, unbeknown to me.

Benjamin Chesterton: David is someone whose photographs have always moved me. His great big generous heart comes across in all his work and never more so than in the beautiful pictures he took in Sri Lanka. I’ve long wanted to turn them into a piece of multimedia, but what can you do with just 10 photos?

I got up one morning to find that David had posted about that experience on the duckrabbit blog. He captured the artist’s predicament in a really simple and powerful way. The desire to make a difference because some cause has embedded itself so deep into you. The feeling that if you don’t do something, it will suffocate you from the inside out.

Pretty much all I did was take his words, grab some screenshots off news sites on the web, use a song that never fails to move me, and mix it all up with his original photo’s. I didn’t tell David I was doing this. Just banged out a rough copy in a day, sent him the link and held my breath.

David: I have scanned, printed, and reproduced those Sri Lanka photos many times. I like them, I think they’re strong, but they’re not new. The words were a few lines I hammered out when I should have been sleeping. Yet, when I saw the finished piece, I cried, as did my wife, Jane.

Since then, that has been the many people’s reaction.

It still amazes me that such simple content can be reworked into something so strong. I could never imagine those stills in a magazine story having the same effect. Imagine going back to a set of pictures you have taken a while ago, that you know intimately, and having them move you to tears. That intrigues and excites me. That’s why I think multimedia offers amazing opportunities for photographers, to get their work out to new audiences, and to use it to reveal the world in new light.