In editing our documentaries, the picture leads. Writing the narration is literally the last thing I do. That doesn’t mean I don’t have concrete ideas about the story, especially since I’ve usually spent a year reporting it. And it doesn’t … Read more
Alan Berner/The Seattle Times. What is “People Without People?” For me it is the sense of people without them being there. It’s the part representing the whole. It’s the significant detail giving … Read more
Mary Beth Meehan/The Providence Journal-Bulletin. As a documentary photographer, I am most interested in using the medium to describe the relationships that people have—with their environment, with each other. I’m fascinated by … Read more
Photo by Torsten Kjellstrand/The Herald. Emotion is the language of documentary photography. Without it, a picture has little value, except possibly as evidence in court. Most of us look for a … Read more
Stan Grossfeld, a 1992 Nieman Fellow, has an enviable job as a photojournalist. An Associate Editor of The Boston Globe, he is free to go wherever his creative instincts lead him—and they have led him all over the world. The … Read more
It was in the 1972 campaign, during a George McGovern rally in a city long forgotten, that I saw a photograph I ache to have made. In shirtsleeves, the Democratic presidential candidate was addressing a sun-drenched crowd from a … Read more
In 1986, during the state of emergency in South Africa, South African photographer Peter Magubane and I had been hidden under the seat of a taxi-combi that took us into a black township off-limits to the press. We went there … Read more
