Visual Journalism

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…

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…

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…

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…

These photographs are from “Israel: A Photobiography, The First Fifty Years,” by Micha Bar-Am, a 1986 Nieman Fellow (Simon & Schuster, 1998). The photos shown, all © Micha Bar-Am/Magnum, are…

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…

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…

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…

Time magazine sent Chris Morris to Albania last summer to get pictures of the election there. Everything worked out fine, they had the page all set and laid out. At…

Georgia O’Keeffe holds her favorite stone from her rock collection. Abiquiu, New Mexico. 1966. She confessed that she stole the stone. © John Loengard.It is not important if photographs are…