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
