Picture This

The Photo Column Finds a Place

The "Rituals" column by Hartford Courant photographer Shana Sureck.

The Philadelphia Inquirer was looking for a columnist in 1998, and Tom Gralish, a staff photographer, saw his chance. "I applied to the city editor," Gralish recalls. "He said, ‘Do you want to be a writer?' and I said, ‘No, but give me the same amount of space, turn it sideways and I'll do the same thing.' "

Ever since, Gralish's column — originally called "City Life'' and now "Scene on the Street" — has run weekly in the local section, delivering a shifting exhibit of Philly's neighborhoods. He does it with a bold black-and-white photograph and just a few words that together say something about Philadelphia. He used a portrait of a Sunday flea market, for instance, to report that the laws that once closed city stores on the Sabbath likely gave birth to outdoor commerce. "I'm a visual journalist," says Gralish, who won a Pulitzer in 1986 for a photo essay on Philadelphia's homeless. "I have a lot of ideas myself, and it's hard to get them into the paper."

But "Scene on the Street" is more than just a column turned sideways. It is part of a growing undercurrent in American newspapers, where the person behind the camera has traditionally been expected to be seen and not heard. From the Inquirer to The Hillsboro (Oregon) Argus, several dozen such photo columns are running at any one time, the most since they were introduced nearly thirty years ago. Though visually driven, they usually include a narrative that blends with the pictures to convey a single impression. Through them, readers visit corners of the community that are overlooked in the daily hunt for the official, the scheduled, the contentious, and the deviant. "I don't think there's enough celebration of ordinary life," says the Hartford Courant photographer Shana Sureck. "When you look at The Best Photojournalism of 2002, it's all about world tragedy."

With her biweekly "Rituals," Sureck captures Connecticut's Governor John Rowland and his wife, Patti, at home watching returns of November's election, which he won. She spends the day at a hospice with Anita Lahn, who is dying of cancer, and her husband, Dan, who fears that he will still hear the clatter of pots and pans after Anita is gone. A "Rituals'' called "Bath Time'' provides an update on a couple who had turned to fertility drugs: "They joked about winding up with triplets. Their joke is now their blessing."

Photo columnists zero in on street life or the back roads or just a person who lives in a certain zip code. They explore ethnicity, nature, social issues. Some do it with just a picture. Newspapers occasionally run more than one column and sometimes post them on their Web sites, with audio. Some get famous, like The New York Times's Sunday wedding column "Vows," Suzanne Kreiter's "On the Beat" in The Boston Globe for which she rode around with city police officers, and Sylvia Plachy's wordless "Unguided Tour" in The Village Voice. A few photo columns have evolved into books. Many have vanished.

In 1975 Charlie Nye wondered how he might use the interesting portraits he shot that didn't make it into stories. At the time, he was a graduate student at the University of Missouri's journalism school, and he got classmates wondering as well. They came up with "Neighbors," a photo column that ran in the student-published Columbia Missourian and is widely credited with getting this whole thing going. "It was a portrait with a four-paragraph narrative emphasizing the person's uniqueness," recalls Nye, fifty-one, a photographer with The Indianapolis Star. "We just wanted a photo with enough journalistic meat so it would be easier to sell to editors."

Mary Beth Meeham's "Our Times" column in The Providence Journal.

After graduate school, he started a photo column at the twice-weekly paper he worked for in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota. Former classmates introduced them elsewhere. Among them, David Rees helped launch "Our Town'' at the Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune, a column — still published — that rotates among staff photographers. Rees eventually returned to the University of Missouri to teach photojournalism. One of his students, Mary Beth Meehan, never forgot the powerful images she saw under the "Our Town" heading. "I've never been that interested in news per se," says Meehan, thirty-five, who landed at The Providence Journal after school. "To me, news stories were temporary events that come and go. I'd go on assignment and meet someone who really fascinated me, and I always wanted to return when the news was over and figure out what it was like in the quiet times."

She made her case to her editors, who agreed to provide a forum for her documentary work. In 1996 Meehan started "Our Times," a weekly photo column that ran until she left the paper in 2001. In it she indulged her curiosity about the elderly woman who got dolled up to go to the dentist. And what the pair of workers who feed napkins through a pressing machine in a hotel laundry room think about all day: "In her head she's decorating the house she'd like to have," Meehan wrote of one. And the funeral home workers at breakfast at a downtown diner: "Seamlessly — as if knowing from years of practice just when the priest would be finishing his farewell — the men in black coats stood up from their stools, adjusted their hats and went back to work."

The year it began, "Our Times" won a Special Recognition award from the National Press Photographers Association. Rees wrote an article for the association magazine about Meehan's work and how photo columns had emerged. Burned-out newspaper photographers across the country saw that article.

One of them was Michal Thompson, a photographer with the 15,000-circulation Hillsboro Argus who had grown tired of the twice-weekly grind. He began crafting "Photojournal," an artful photograph with a brief, impressionistic text reflecting what he sees around Hillsboro. At first, slightly shy about his public experiment, he alternated new work with his previously published pictures. He has since scrapped the archival stuff and now produces "Photojournal" each week.

Thompson pulled the thread further, sending out an e-mail inviting fellow photo columnists to send along samples of their work. An envelope stuffed with columns has now made two round trips to Hillsboro, with about half a dozen stops in between, in places like Ottawa, Illinois, and Birmingham. Shana Sureck's work is in there. Tom Gralish's, too. So is the work of Scott Sharpe, a photographer with the Raleigh News & Observer who became dismayed that the towns and traditions of his native rural North Carolina had fallen off the news pages, replaced by coverage of urban high-tech industry and development. With "Postcards from the Road," Sharpe rescues one slice of North Carolina from obscurity each month. Recent examples include the regular Saturday night jam sessions of no-name bands in Snow Camp, the man who makes famous fried pork chops in Mount Airy, and Cherryville, where townies fire guns into the sky to usher in the new year and drive out bad spirits.

"I feel more like a journalist and less like a photographer," says Sharpe, who not only writes and photographs "Postcards," but records audio for an online edition. "If I could choose my title on my business card it would be ‘storyteller.' "

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