
Why take pictures?
Photographers create images for many reasons:
- Fine Art
- Professional Clients
- Personal Pleasure
We can discuss whether a single photograph is compelling or boring. Yet we live in an age of almost infinite visual images. Why do we look at an image? Because our friends or family or someone we find interesting posted it on Instagram? Do we like photos because of qualities in the photography? Or because we like, or want to be liked, by the person who took it? How long do you look at a photo on Instagram? More than one second? Or less?
Social Documentary
In fields like
- Photojournalism
- Social Documentary
- Art Installation
photographers and artists still try to create individually powerful and aesthetic images, but what becomes more important is that each image is part of telling some larger story.
Your Storytelling/Photography project
This week, use any camera – a real one if you have one, or a phone is fine – to tell some story you care about.
Topics
You can choose any topic. It might be a story with Personal, Campus, City, State, National, or Global interest.
- Puvunga
- Your campus group
- Wetlands preservation near Long Beach
- Surfing in Seal Beach
- California Wildfires
- Homelessness
- SoCal Drought
- Life in a Family
- One small DACA story
- Climate Change
- or anything else you care about
Personal
Even if your story is big, try to keep it small, local, personal. If you want to do a story on Climage Change or Youth Climate Strikes, you probably won’t have the chance to spend time with Greta Thunberg, but if your friends are making posters for a march, or working on how to have smaller carbon footprints, you can create a Photo Story about them.
Your Photostory Project
- 6-12 Images
- 1 (or more) sentence captions for each image
- Post to your blog
Questions to answer
- Why did you choose this story?
- How do you think you did?
- Which image do you think is the individually "best" image in your story?
- Does your photostory contain an image that you think is not, by itself, a "great" image, but that is nonetheless important because it helps to tell your story?
- What would you do different next time?
- Are there other Photo Stories you might like to tell?
