Source: http://time.com/3625800/ways-of-seeing-pho...
Whether through digital channels, print or on exhibit, the impact, influence and reach of the still image has never been greater. But with so many images fighting for our attention, how do photographers make work that most effectively stands out and connects with an audience. In this seven-part series, TIME looks back over the past 12 months to identify some of the ways of seeing—whether conceptually, aesthetically or through dissemination—that have grabbed our attention and been influential in maintaining photography's relevance in an ever shifting environment, media landscape, and culture now ruled by images.
Ways of Seeing- Direct to Audience
Ways of Seeing- Documentary Still Life
Ways of Seeing- Portrait Series
Ways of Seeing- The Contemporary Photo Essay
Ways of Seeing- From Stills to Motion
Ways of Seeing- The Growth of the Everyday Everywhere Movement
Ways of Seeing- Direct to Audience
2014 saw an increase in independent photographers cutting out the middle man and going direct to audience. Facebook, Twitter and particularly Instagram have been instrumental in building online communities and growing audiences for photographers for some time. But this year saw the monetization of these platforms through various print sale initiatives by photo agencies—Magnum and VII—and individual photographers including Aaron Huey who as well as his own project also worked with Grayson Shaffer, a Senior Editor at Outside magazine—for a good cause, the Sherpas Fund—raising close to $500,000 for the families of the Sherpa guides killed in an avalanche on Mount Everest in April. These time-limited campaigns, advertised through Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, identified a demand for affordable un-editioned prints.
This year also saw an unprecedented growth in high-quality independent book publishing, with some of the year's best titles coming in short runs from independent sources. Without the cost margins and restrictions imposed by major publishers, photographers producing their own photobooks not only had more control over the finished product but could also sell their high quality books at a lower price point. Highlights included Peter van Agtmael's Disco Nights Sept. 11 (independently published by Redhook editions) which was singled out for a special mention in TIME's Best Photobooks of the Year selection.
Raising awareness was a consideration for going direct to audience in 2014 for Dysturb a French photo collective. Frustrated by the lack of opportunities for photojournalists to get their work out effectively through established media channels, Dysturb turned to the street—wheat pasting large format prints by both emerging and established documentary photographers on disused city walls. The participant network quickly grew from the first postings in Paris with work soon appearing on the streets of Sarajevo and New York. The group's goal now is to develop a network of like-minded photographers and photography enthusiasts that will allow, in the future, to mount worldwide pasting campaigns on short notice. And judging from the enthusiastic New York crowd, the need for an alternative way to show news images is shared by many more people than Dysturb's founders imagined when they launched the collective in early 2014.
And while the naysayers will continue to lament today's changing business practices, we can expect to see a lot more photographers adopt the direct-to-audience model in 2015.
Ways of Seeing- Documentary Still Life
When documenting news events, circumstances sometimes necessitate that photographers take a more conceptual approach to their work. This year, several major stories—from the conflict in Ukraine to the fight against Ebola–were fraught with danger for those photojournalists who covered them, while other events, from the detention and murder of Western journalists by ISIS to the kidnapping of 219 Nigerian schoolgirls by Boko Haram, offered seemingly little possible photographic access or opportunity for proper documentation.
Glenna Gordon, a documentary photographer who has worked extensively in Africa, produced some of the most effective work of the past 12 months by changing her approach. Gordon's still life images of personal possessions—including dresses, schoolbooks and notes belonging to the kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls and a two dimensional paper chess set used in captivity by western journalists abducted by ISIS—are the result of strict journalistic rigor and research. And in their simplicity, they form powerful images of significance, humanity and loss.
Other documentary photographers took a similar still-life approach while covering the violent street protests in Ukraine; Donald Weber produced a series of photographs of Molotov cocktails, while Davide Monteleonephotographed weapons used by protestors and police officers.
Elsewhere Rick Loomis working in Central African Republic documented the weapons of war for the Los Angeles Times and Marco Pavan working for Colors magazine shot the objects left behind on the Italian island of Lampedusa, by the thousands of African migrants making the perilous boat journey to Europe.
Larry Towell's book Afghanistan, published this year, also incorporated still life images—in this case of prosthesis and landmines—to remind us that there is a long tradition of photojournalists taking still life photographs as part of their documentary work.
Ways of Seeing- Portrait Series
This year there was a plethora of portrait series taken by photojournalists, who consciously chose to isolate their subjects from their context and deliver typological studies of them in multiple.
For the past four years, Associated Press photographer Muhammad Muheisen (TIME's Best Wire Photographer of the Year 2013) has consistently produced strong documentary work of daily life from the slums of Islamabad, Pakistan. In January this year, he filed a series of images to the news wires that were widely published to much acclaim. Unlike his previous work, which was shot in a traditional reportage manner, these were close-up portraits of Afghan child refugees photographed against simple backdrops. The poignancy and power of these bare images is reinforced through the repetition of individual dirty faces and their emotive, direct gaze.
Amongst the many photojournalist who took a similar approach, were Anastasia Taylor-Lind—who produced a simple and nuanced portrait series of individual protestors in Kiev's Independence Square in Ukraine (using Instagram and Facebook to share her entire process with her followers and her subjects), Pete Muller who photographed men—both soldiers and civilians—in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for his study into the causes of male-perpetrated violence, Andrew Quilty who made two portrait series related to the war against Islamic State Militants—one of Syrian Kurdish refugee women who had fled the fighting and another of Iraqi Kurdish militia men in training to seize back their homeland, and Andrea Bruce who as part of an innovative collective project with fellow Noor photographers Nina Berman, Stanley Greene and Alixandra Fazzina took photo booth portraits—in a converted tent—of refugees and their cherished possessions, at the Zaatari camp in Jordan.
On a lighter note Philipp Engelhorn's images of beach goers in Quindao, China, wearing strange masks and suites to protect themselves from the sun and jellyfishes weirdly recall Rineke Dijkstra's early 90's beach portraits, and Martina Bacigalupo's series of found portraits from the oldest photographic studio in Gulu, Northern Uganda—discarded and faceless images after passport portraits have been stamped from the prints—offer a surreal take on the approach. More recently Daniel Berehulak took a clean and graphic approach to augment his powerful long term reportage work covering Ebola in Africa, with a series of strong, stark, black and white portraits of Ebola workers that showed the disease from another equally powerful perspective.
Ways of Seeing- The Contemporary Photo Essay
We live in an age where the volume of photographic output has never been greater. Yet the propensity is for images to be conceived, received digested and regurgitated in an isolated, singular form—and without further context. Against this backdrop, a generation of committed photographers are working passionately to iterate on, and further develop the traditions for long form story telling, and in so doing, draw attention to their subject matter through new powerful, innovative and resourceful ways.
On Aug. 31 this year, the New York TimesMagazine published a photo essay that interweaved the images of two Magnum photographers working on each side of the Israeli, Palestinian conflict—Paolo Pellegrin (in Gaza) and Peter van Agtmael (in Israel). The essay was not only a creative and effective way of balancing a delicate and sensitive story, it was also, as Editor-in-Chief Jake Silverstein explained in a note about the project, conceived in part as a reaction to “the prevalence of cellphone cameras and social media [that had] led to many more images of Gaza than in previous iterations of this long-running conflict."
"As powerful as these photos were," he wrote, “the speed and fervor of their dissemination tended to bring them to us isolated from context.” The Times Magazine story was a considered attempt to have Pellegrin and van Agtmael slow things down and in Silversteins words “try to capture a deeper and more narrative sense of the texture of life on the ground." The resultant essay, that intentionally combines two aesthetically different bodies of work emphasizes “that the fates of average Israelis and Palestinians are intertwined.”
Photographer Matt Black has subverted the prevalent philosophy of Instagram for his project The Geography of Poverty. Although using Instagram as one of the primary platforms for the work, Black has maintained a thematic and aesthetic cohesion to produce a dedicated feed—devoid of distraction or interference—that builds image by image, to deliver an investigation on poverty that is essayistic and closer to that of a traditional photo essay. On the website—exclusively dedicated to the project—Black explores the potential of geo-tagging to extend the project and map the images (for this project, Black was selected as TIME's Instagram Photographer of the Year in 2014)
Photographers such as Diana Markosian with her work made in Beslan, Russia and Carolyn Drake in Turkistan have embraced different types of media and photographic approaches--including still life, documentary, portraiture as well as writing and drawing. They have also actively encouraged their subjects to contribute to the artistic process and tell their own stories through notated recollections narratives and artwork, which is at times directly applied to the photographic print. As Drake says of her project Wild Pigeon that documents the lives of the Uyghur people: “I started looking for meaning at the intersection of our views, and find ways to bring the people I was meeting into the creative process. Traveling with a box of prints, a pair of scissors, a container of glue, colored pencils, and a sketchbook, I asked willing collaborators to draw on, re-assemble, and use their own tools on my photographs. I hoped that the new images would bring Uyghur perspectives into the work and facilitate a new kind of dialogue with the people I met, one that was face-to-face and tactile, if mostly without words.”
In Ukraine a generation of young, predominantly European, freelance photographers including Maria Turchenkova, Ross McDonnell and Capucine Granier-Deferre committed themselves to documenting the searing violence and the disquieting consequences of the year-long conflict—building long-term photo essays that contextualize news events through more in-depth and nuanced perspectives.
One of the most important and powerful bodies of work was produced by Daniel Berehulak, who spent more than 14 weeks covering the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. His work, made on assignment for The New York Times, shows that long-term commitment to a story can reap astounding returns. And a powerful continuum of work, can raise awareness and deeply affect its audience.
In an age when we're saturated with an omnivorous barrage of distracting and singular imagery, there is still a role for subtleties embodied within the traditions of long form storytelling. Through innovative, full screen photo-centric web designs and effective digital dissemination, these photo essays are drawing our attention—in different and often more meaningful ways—to important issues that we otherwise would ignore or at best feel we had seen too many times before.
Ways of Seeing- From Stills to Motion
The moving image has become a defacto aspect of today’s photography landscape, with B-roll, behind-the-scenes videos of photo shoots and requests for photographers to shoot video as well as stills.
But this year some photographers found a way to preserve the conceit of the still image while extending its form to video, in a poetic and absorbing manner by shooting slow motion video—at a thousand frames a second. Magnum’s Jonas Bendiksen made short sequences of celebrating fans at the FIFA World Cup in Brazil and Ross McDonnell created vignettes (effectively photos that came to life) amidst the fire and ice of the protests in Kiev, Ukraine. The images (see Bendiksen’s video above) have a mesmerizing quality extrapolating and magnifying the frozen incidental moment to a absorbing sequence.
Elsewhere Gifs and memes evolved to the more subtle, and sophisticated Cinemagraph to bring the still photo to life in other ways and Instagram embraced the short form video amongst its square format photo stream. But one of the simplest and most effective of executions of still photography to video was realized on The New YorkTimes‘ website coverage of the Indian elections which utilized seven-second clips by Daniel Berehulak shot with a locked off camera of people moving through the frame to bring the photo to life.
Ways of Seeing- The Growth of the Everyday Everywhere Movement
There is little doubt that when Everyday Africa was launched by photographer Peter DiCampo and writer Austin Merrill in 2012, it offered a welcome and refreshingly positive take on a continent that was so often portrayed through strife, turmoil, war and famine. The project—made with smartphones and disseminated through social media platforms including Tumblr and Instagram—concentrated on showing the mundane and incidental aspects of everyday life to reveal a side of Africa that was often overlooked. Everyday Africa's subsequent expansion from its two founder members to a wider network of contributing photographers established the model that this year became a franchise and spread Everyday's reach across the globe, from Everyday Asia and Everyday Latin America to Everyday Bronx.
One of the most interesting developments came when David Guttenfelder (TIME's Instagram Photographer of the Year 2013), Matt Black (TIME's Instagram Photographer of the Year 2014) and a collective of talented documentary photographers—and equally innovative Instagram users—launched Everyday USA, not only to record offbeat moments but to bring awareness to off-the-radar issues here at home. This year, TIME gave the group its first commission for #TIMEvets, a multi-platform project coinciding with Veterans Day. Alongside Everyday USA, Guttenfelder somehow found time in his busy newfound freelance career (this year, he parted ways with the Associated Press after 20 years) to initiate Everyday DPRK to continue his work from inside North Korea through the lenses of the country's homegrown photographic talent.
Over the past two years, DiCampo has helped guide photographers interested in developing their own outshoots – with Everyday Asia and Everyday Latin America drawing on his input to shape their message. And this year, the Everyday project matured when the "owners" of some of the most successful Everyday accounts met for the first time in New York to coincide with an exhibition of their work. "I think we have a voice to talk about what cell phone photography is and to try, in some way, to lead the discussion on rights, usage and [the like]," DiCampo told TIME in September last year. The meeting resulted in the creation of the Everyday Everywhere project, which has the ambitious goal of changing "the way we see the world".
While 2014 saw the explosion in the number of Everyday feeds on Instagram, 2015 could be a make-or-break year for many of them. The original purpose of Everyday Africa was to combat the stereotypical imagery that emerged from the continent. There are other places that could benefit from a similar approach, but only the most rigorous of practitioners – with well thought-out plans – will be able to sustain their followers' interest in the long-run. The risk is that the multiplication of such feeds – Everyday Climate Change launched on Jan. 1 with a staggering number of participating photographers – will dilute their importance, bringing to an end one of the most interesting photographic experiments we've seen in years.
