Andrea Pitzer is the author of three books of narrative nonfiction that explore untold histories. She was the editor of Nieman Storyboard from 2009-2012,
Storyboard recently talked about visual storytelling and intimacy with two very different journalists: an independent 30-year veteran and a newsroom staff photographer just two years out of graduate school. Read more
Storyboard recently talked about visual storytelling and intimacy with two very different journalists: an independent 30-year veteran and a newsroom staff photographer just two years out of graduate school. Tomorrow, we’ll learn what it was like for a seasoned pro to turn a camera on his own family in the midst of crisis. Today, we hear from Sonya Hebert of The Dallas Morning News, who finished a master’s program in visual communications in 2007.
Hebert’s two large-scale efforts to date include a look into adult palliative care at Baylor University and a portrait of a family whose baby lived only five days as a result of a genetic defect. Her video of the baby and his parents pairs beautifully with the print story in “Choosing Thomas," a multimedia project selected earlier this year as a Notable Narrative.
On trying to shoot intimate pictures of sick adults under less-than-ideal conditions, Hebert says,
“What we saw over and over again was a patient in a bed in a hospital room. Visually it looked all the same, so it required tuning out what I was hearing, and really looking. Thinking, ‘How can I tell this story visually?’ Sometimes it was getting tight in on someone and waiting for them to look up in a certain way in a dark room—being ready for something to happen.”
Later, Hebert struggled with the challenge of making Thomas, a terminally-ill baby, fully human for viewers:
“In the middle of editing, I didn’t feel like the reader could fall in love with Thomas. I was worried about doing a story about a baby to begin with, and he was tougher, because he didn’t do a lot. There were just a few moments where he was like a normal little baby and you could see how cute he was. There’s a clip where he’s sneezing, and TK is saying, ‘Oh, that was my eye!’ It was something to bring a lighter side to the story before we got into the heavy dying part.”
Read the full interview. Read more
Adrienne Mayor was a 2009 National Book Award finalist for her nonfiction book The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy. Mayor, a visiting scholar at Stanford University, has made a career of writing about monsters, … Read more
Here’s a narrative challenge: recount a quarter-century of lab experiments conducted by several investigative teams working separately from Kyoto to California. Now make the story urgent and give it a sense of Olympic-level competition that might change the face of medicine. Read more
Earlier this year, at the first TED conference in India, Hans Rosling predicted the year and month that India and China will overtake the West and return Asia to world dominance. He began in classic storytelling mode with a … Read more
Dave Gilson A scene from the opening of a prime-time cable series? Nope—it’s the lead from a story in last month’s Mother Jones. Dave Gilson’s piece narrates a mock riot … Read more
This week, Michael Zhang (@PetaPixel) tweeted a link to this striking photo gallery of the Athens riots, which is composed of AP, AFP and Getty images. I was particularly intrigued by the role-reversal in this … Read more
I was recently taken with a piece that ran earlier this year in High Country News. Written by Michelle Nijhuis, “Township 13 South, Range 92 West, Section 35” explores the idea of family roots and also offers a brief meditation on Western … Read more
This weekend, The Wichita Eagle started an interesting storytelling experiment. Well, actually the experiment started a few weeks ago, when they posted a trailer for an upcoming narrative project on Kansas.com. Book trailers (like this one, … Read more
What could be more dramatic than the story of a father and son swept nine miles out to sea, floating overnight together and then alone, uncertain of survival? In the November issue of Men’s Journal, Justin Heckert takes a rescue … Read more
