- Between weeks 8 and 12, each student should provide a weekly reflection (500 words) on the data you have collected to date.
- What data did you collect?
- What is your initial impression of the data?
- How have the data you have collected this week changed/progressed your thinking about your research project?
- What challenges did you encounter while collecting the data?
- What are your next steps?
This week, I decided to work on the photography side of my project. I haven’t ever created a photo essay before, but I am very experienced in photography, and particularly portrait photography. To learn more about how to approach making this final product, I wanted to read more about what makes for an effective photo essay. I often read the Lens Blog of photo essays in the New York Times, and many of my readings for photography class discussions come from this source, so I sifted through a bunch of the more recent posts to explore the strategies that professionals are taking to present current events through a combination of photographs and words/research.
Because I am not actually using any concrete information from any of the sources that I skimmed through, I’m not planning on including them in my bibliography, but I now do have a better idea of how these essays are generally presented.
In addition, I looked over some photo essays with more relevant subject matter to my project. These are the sources that I am adding to my annotated bib. this week.
Estrin, James. “12 Emerging Photographers You Should Know.” The New York Times. The New York Times, September 14, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/lens/12-emerging-photographers-you-should-know.html.
This article from the New York Times’ Lens Blog highlights twelve different photojournalists–many of whom have published photo essays in the blog–that people interested in photography should be aware of. This was a helpful springboard from which to begin learning more about the type of content that professional photo essays are addressing today, and the types of photographs that the artists choose to make in order to make their essays most powerful. It was also exciting to read about the younger photographers who are making a big impact in this sphere right now. I am most interested in how photo essays can encourage readers/viewers to engage with otherwise taboo topics (violence, sex, gender, politics…) because of their unique combination of text and art. This format is more accessible in a lot of ways, and seems to me to serve a different audience than a traditional academic paper.
Mark, Mary Ellen. “Picture This.” CNNMoney. Cable News Network, 2015. https://money.cnn.com/katrina/index.html.
This is a photo essay relevant to our class’ discussion of Hurricane Katrina and the influence of neoliberal principles on its aftermath and its uneven impact on the underprivileged population of New Orleans. This is a helpful source for me because it approaches a related topic to my research, and was cited by CNN as one of the best photo recent essays when it was published in 2015. The essay was created by a news photographer who was sent to document the impact and recovery of New Orleans ten years post-Katrina. She includes brief case studies of several different individuals who were and continue to be impacted significantly by the disaster. I am very interested in the way that Mark formats her essay in a dynamic website format that is both visually satisfying and well-organized. I’m thinking that maybe I will try to create a similar product for my final work.
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Comments:
Thanks for your reflection, Meghan. I am glad to hear that you find the idea of doing a photo essay exciting.
But I am little bit confused. Your research project will be on the relationship between neoliberalism and reproductive justice, right? How are you exactly planning to do a photo essay about this relationship?
We should talk about this in person tomorrow or later this week.
