Multimedia

These are challenging times for documentary photography and photojournalism. Fewer print outlets, reduced editorial budgets, and publishers chasing the lowest common denominator as an audience mean getting creative photographic stories published is difficult. The mainstream media – as I have detailed in my posts on the ‘Revolutions in the Media Economy‘ and the ‘New Media Landscape – was suffering financially because of falling circulation long before the ‘credit crunch’ became a recession, but the economic crises that now abound only add to the trouble.

And, yet…these are also exciting times. The web is changing everything, and ‘multimedia’ is the catch-all phrase for these changes. Whether it be audio slideshows, rich media videos, or Flash web sites that build resources and links around photo-films, still photographs are being deployed in conjunction with other media to tell compelling stories and make long-form, in-depth journalism achievable. Brian Storm, founder of the pioneering MediaStorm, made this case well in his commencement address to University of Missouri journalism graduates. And many of the current issues were surveyed in the Spring 2010 Nieman Reports special issue on “Visual Journalism: Fresh Approaches and New Business Strategies for the Multimedia Age” that I contributed to.

In the summer of 2008 I had the pleasure of presenting to and learning from a workshop on multimedia at the Dalian College of Image Art in China. At the end of that week I chaired a debate on multimedia and the future of photojournalism involving Brian Storm, Dirck Halstead of The Digital Journalist, and Dan Chung of The Guardian. You can see the debate video (82 mins) on Vimeo.

Multimedia allows collaborative work on projects that tell important stories visually. On related pages, you will see details and links to the work I have been doing in multimedia — The Boarding House, Living in the Shadows, and Laygate Stories.

Photo credit: zen/Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license