New Strategies

Image-based media can be re-conceived according to what one wants to accomplish as an artist and/or documentarian, aided by an extraordinary abundance of tools and platforms. Included below are some examples of alternative strategies that emerge from classes that I have taught and from projects that I have worked on, as well as others that have not been sufficiently utilized. Hopefully these examples can encourage more nuanced and impactful approaches while facilitating greater engagement by both subjects and readers.

Interactive Portraits

It is now possible in the digital age to make a portrait of someone, show the person the picture, and record their response to the question: Does this photograph represent who you are? Please explain...

Four Corners

This is a template to embed specific kinds of information concealed within the four corners of a photograph so as to provide considerably more contextualization for the reader. It also invites the photographer to include their own short, easily understandable code of ethics, choosing from a selection or creating one for themself.

Four Corners

Ripple Effect

Henri Cartier-Bresson once told me to read four books, one of them being Zen in the Art of Archery. What I understood from the book was that the best way to hit the target is not by aiming, but by letting the target come to you. Rather than catching a butterfly by running after it with a net, one can hold the net and let it fly to you…

The Active Reader

In this project on the impact of radiation on human health, we made the captions invisible until the reader rolled the cursor over the image. It encouraged the reader to contemplate the multiple meanings of the imagery, and the humanity of the people depicted, rather than immediately labelling them and moving on…

Peace Photography

Journalistic photography is primarily reactive, depicting devastating events (war, famine, disease, natural disaster) as they happen, or their aftermaths, rather than making images proactively to diminish or avoid such cataclysms…

Cubist Realities

Tourists usually view only a façade that excludes the lives of the people who live and work in a place. Here the reader can roll over each image and find out more about what lies behind, making photography more Cubist with an expectation of multiple, perhaps even contradictory perspectives…

Transmedia

The revolution encouraged by digital media is not so much multimedia, but transmedia – the ability to output the underlying code of a photograph into sound, or of any medium into another…

First- and Third-Person

Cartier-Bresson defined photojournalism as keeping a journal with a camera. The addition of the first-person perspective, presenting a photograph of the world while providing access to one’s own personal musings, allows a transparency that can create a more credible bond with the reader…

Avoiding the Quantum Collapse

Words can limit a photograph to a particular meaning or allow it to retain multiple meanings, much like the wave-particle duality in quantum physics where it is the observer that causes a collapse into only one state…

The Photograph as Question

The legacy of 20th-century photography is for the photograph to concentrate on providing answers rather than questions. But what if one photographs what one does not understand, making that clear to the reader, and asking for their help in deciding what was going on…

Non-Linear Narratives

Digital environments such as the Web encourage non-linear narratives which have the advantage of engaging readers in determining the storyline….

A Disappearing Text

Here the intention was to allow the reader to free the imagery from the constraining text, an engagement that acknowledged the constraints within which the people depicted lived, afraid to show their faces due to their status as HIV-positive…

New Strategies

Interactive Portraits

Four Corners

Ripple Effect

The Active Reader

Peace Photography

Cubist Realities

Transmedia

First- and Third-Person

Avoiding the Quantum Collapse

The Photograph as Question

Non-Linear Narratives

A Disappearing Text

To read

To view

Events

Contact us