essential skills: digital photography in available light
Introduction
The purpose of constructing a photographic essay is to communicate a story through a sequence
of images to a viewer. Just as in writing a book, a short story or a poem the photographer must fi rst
have an idea of what they want to say. In a photographic essay it is the images instead of words
that must be organized to tell the story. Individual images are like descriptive and informative
sentences. When the images are carefully assembled they create a greater understanding of the
individual, event or activity being recorded than a single image could hope to achieve. Words
should be seen as secondary to the image and are often only used to clarify the content.
The fi rst stories
In 1890 the photographer Jacob Riis working in New York produced one of the earliest photographic
essays titled ‘How the other half lives’. National Geographic magazine began using photographs
in 1903 and by 1905 they had published an eleven-page photographically illustrated piece on the
city of Lhassa in Tibet. In 1908 the freelance photographer Lewis W. Hine produced a body of work
for a publication called Charities and the Commons. The photographs documented immigrants in
the New York slums. Due to the concerned efforts of many photographers working at this time to
document the ‘human condition’ and the public’s growing appetite for the medium, photography
gradually became accepted. The fi rst ‘tabloid newspaper’ (the Illustrated Daily News) appeared in
the USA in 1919. By this time press cameras were commonly hand-held and fl ash powder made
it possible to take images in all lighting conditions.
The Vet - Michael Mullan