PHOTOGRAPHERS AT WORK
Moving Pictures
Gail Fisher's transition from still to video
In the world of photojournalism, some long-standing boundaries are being breached — often with surprising results.
In early 2000, Gail Fisher, a senior photo editor at the Los Angeles Times, became fascinated with the plight of the nation’s 20,000 young people who “age out” of the foster care system each year — youngsters who reach their eighteenth birthday or high school graduation — and are set adrift to fend for themselves. Many end up in the streets, homeless, on welfare, or drug-addicted. About 40 percent don’t graduate from high school; within two years a third have children, usually out of wedlock; and 18 percent spend time in jail.
To tell that story, Fisher followed three such youths for the entire first year of their new lives: Janea, who spent six years in foster care after trying to bludgeon her aunt with a claw hammer; Monique, the cast-off child of a heroin-addicted mother, who became an unwed mother herself at age fifteen; and Jesse, who’d been a foster care child since the sixth grade when his father punished him by putting a diaper on him and parading him around his school.
To do full justice to the foster child story, Fisher decided on an unusual strategy: she’d cover it not only with her arsenal of 35 mm still cameras, but with a video camera as well.
The resulting multimedia story, titled “Crashing Hard into Adulthood,” became a page-one special report in the Times on December 2, 2001, with five inside pages of photos; an elaborate and detailed entry on the Times Web site; and is scheduled to be broadcast as an entire segment of ABC News’s Nightline, using Fisher’s videotape footage. The Web pages include a photo gallery of eighty-five images, several video segments, and the full text of the series written by the Times reporter Phil Willon (www.latimes.com/news/la-foster-special).
The Fisher-Willon project is one of the more spectacular successes in a burgeoning journalistic movement: newspaper and magazine photographers adding an important arrow to their quiver, namely proficiency in shooting videotape to bring another dimension to their reporting. The movement had its roots in the middle 1990’s when a few mavericks like Michael Rosenblum, a former CBS News producer (see sidebar), began experimenting with small video cameras to see if news for television could be covered by one person rather than the traditional five-person crew — reporter, producer, cameraman, soundman, plus a videotape editor. Other theorizers followed, most notably Dirck Halstead, a former member of the Time-Life stable of swashbuckling photojournalists. In 1997, Halstead created a Webzine called The Digital Journalist as an intelligencer for still photographers eager to spread their wings into video. And in 1999, he set up the Platypus Workshops — two-week boot camps to train photojournalists in the basics of video production. (Platypus: a furry, egg-laying, duck-billed hybrid discovered in Australia in the 1700s, which defied classification and thus was seen as an odd new species, neither bird, nor mammal, nor reptile.) Halstead’s notion was that photojournalists, with their natural eye and storytelling expertise, could learn the language of television — not to compete for the jobs of TV cameramen but to expand their own techniques of telling stories.
Gail Fisher had been a photojournalist for more than twenty years and won a phenomenal number of awards: the Robert F. Kennedy Award for outstanding coverage of disadvantaged people; acclaim from the National Press Photographers Association, the Society of Newspaper Design, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and many others. She had earned degrees from Miami University in Ohio and from Ohio University, married, had two children (Whitney and Zachary; she’s now separated from her husband), and had photo internships at the Courier Journal & Louisville Times, the Dayton Journal Herald, and the San Bernardino Sun before joining the Los Angeles Times in 1983 as a photographer on the Orange County edition.
By her own estimate, she’s “the kind of person who always wants challenges, to be learning something new.” Forty-eight-year-old Fisher, besides being a photo editor, is a globe-trotting still photographer — the Middle East, Vietnam, Central and South America, India, Russia, Africa, Burma. On assignment in Mongolia in 1997, she encountered scenes that needed sound and motion to convey their full impact, and which could not be captured adequately with her still cameras. Mongolia was “like a step back in time — flute music playing in the morning, smoke swirling over campfires. I thought, my gosh, I can’t get all this with stills. There are so many more dimensions.” She calls the experience an “awakening.”
And so she found her way to Halstead’s Platypus Workshop, then at the University of Oklahoma. The Times paid her expenses, but not before the newspaper’s director of photography, Colin Crawford, expressed concern that her experimentation in a new medium might affect the quality of her still pictures. He was supportive, she says, but issued a friendly warning that if he saw things in her video that weren’t in her stills, that would be the end of the video.
The Platypus training was intense, long days with no distractions. “I was so frustrated that first week,” Fisher remembers. “I just wasn’t getting it. I had never picked up a video camera. Some very accomplished photographers were in the class; some were learning quicker than others.” All the new technical information was getting in the way of her puzzling out how to tell a simple story with sound and moving pictures. By the second week, however, she was beginning to believe she might get the hang of it.
Halstead remembers her efforts this way: “Gail’s first two exercises were disasters. She didn’t know what she was doing or why she was there.” Her final project was so good, however, that he told her in class: “You’re going to be a filmmaker. You know how to tell stories. You’re committed, and you’ll learn more of this language as you go along.”
Her first still-and-video story was the foster care piece — a home run on her first trip to the plate. She ended up with more than forty hours of videotape and, a bit overwhelmed by the task of editing it, requested the help of a Platypus instructor, Rolf Behrens. He created a ten-minute rough-cut sample, which he took to Nightline’s executive producer, Tom Bettag, who quickly saw its value.
Photo boss Crawford now shares Fisher’s enthusiasm for multimedia storytelling. A shortcoming of traditional newspapering, he points out, is that a terrific story can appear on page one for a day, and then is gone. With the Web, the piece not only reaches a broader audience, but stays around a lot longer — with value-added sound and motion. Fisher’s foster care project, he says, was a perfect example of how to tell a story on multiple levels with multiple venues from newspaper to Internet to television. “With each new medium, the news consumer gains more information,” he says. “Put it all together and it makes a pretty incredible package.” Two other Los Angeles Times photographers have since completed the Platypus course.
“Crashing Hard into Adulthood” was the most challenging story she’s ever done, Fisher says, “and the most rewarding.” At 125 pounds and five feet, seven inches, she lugged sixty pounds of equipment: two or three still cameras, video camera, tapes, film, batteries, extra lenses, tripod. “I work out at the gym consistently, lifting free weights,” she says. “You’ve got to be in good shape.”
Underlying this evolution of a new journalistic hybrid is the conviction that traditional photojournalism, as practiced since the days of Matthew Brady, is as dead as the dodo bird. Reasons? No more magazines like Life and Look; changes in production methods at magazines like Time and Newsweek that make multi-page photo stories less desirable and less necessary. Photos in magazines these days most often simply illustrate text, rather than telling the whole story in pictures, as renowned photographers like W. Eugene Smith, David Douglas Duncan, Walker Evans, and Alfred Eisenstaedt did in their famous photo essays.
“Once you understand what’s happening, you see there is no future for print photojournalism,” Halstead says. “So if this is true, what do you do if you’re a photographer? Throw yourself under a bus, which I considered doing when I figured this out for the first time? Go into some other line of work?”
Fortunately a few trends were under way to mitigate the gloom. The cost of small, digital video cameras and their related gear was far lower than it had been less than a decade earlier, and the equipment produced perfectly acceptable broadcast-quality images. Simultaneously, the number of cable networks was exploding, creating a demand for millions of hours of programming a year. The fractionization of the television audience meant less advertising revenue per channel and thus less money available to buy programs. Cable channels such as National Geographic, A&E, Discovery, Lifetime, the Learning Channel, and others became occasional customers for the free-lance work of video journalists who could produce programs cheaply. Internet users were acquiring broadband capability, giving them a television-like experience on their computers, with much higher-quality motion pictures and sound. All of that conspired to make the future look brighter for photojournalists who’d been demoralized for years by dwindling demand for their still pictures.
There was bad news mixed in: the potential markets for video
journalism are still evolving, and they are too scattered to support
all the photographers who aspire to become multimedia mavens.
And some photojournalists are finding out that, no matter how
hard they try, they have little knack for seeing a story in terms
of motion pictures and sound. An easy transition is not guaranteed.
For true believers like Gail Fisher, however, seeing the world
through the eyepiece of a video camera offers an exciting new
style of practicing good old-fashioned journalism.
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