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How to Create an Engaging Photo Essay (with Examples)

Photo essays tell a story in pictures. They're a great way to improve at photography and story-telling skills at once. Learn how to do create a great one.

Learn | Photography Guides | By Ana Mireles

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Photography is a medium used to tell stories – sometimes they are told in one picture, sometimes you need a whole series. Those series can be photo essays.

If you’ve never done a photo essay before, or you’re simply struggling to find your next project, this article will be of help. I’ll be showing you what a photo essay is and how to go about doing one.

You’ll also find plenty of photo essay ideas and some famous photo essay examples from recent times that will serve you as inspiration.

If you’re ready to get started, let’s jump right in!

Table of Contents

What is a Photo Essay?

A photo essay is a series of images that share an overarching theme as well as a visual and technical coherence to tell a story. Some people refer to a photo essay as a photo series or a photo story – this often happens in photography competitions.

Photographic history is full of famous photo essays. Think about The Great Depression by Dorothea Lange, Like Brother Like Sister by Wolfgang Tillmans, Gandhi’s funeral by Henri Cartier Bresson, amongst others.

What are the types of photo essay?

Despite popular belief, the type of photo essay doesn’t depend on the type of photography that you do – in other words, journalism, documentary, fine art, or any other photographic genre is not a type of photo essay.

Instead, there are two main types of photo essays: narrative and thematic .

As you have probably already guessed, the thematic one presents images pulled together by a topic – for example, global warming. The images can be about animals and nature as well as natural disasters devastating cities. They can happen all over the world or in the same location, and they can be captured in different moments in time – there’s a lot of flexibility.

A narrative photo essa y, on the other hand, tells the story of a character (human or not), portraying a place or an event. For example, a narrative photo essay on coffee would document the process from the planting and harvesting – to the roasting and grinding until it reaches your morning cup.

What are some of the key elements of a photo essay?

• Tell a unique story – A unique story doesn’t mean that you have to photograph something that nobody has done before – that would be almost impossible! It means that you should consider what you’re bringing to the table on a particular topic.
• Put yourself into the work – One of the best ways to make a compelling photo essay is by adding your point of view, which can only be done with your life experiences and the way you see the world.
• Add depth to the concept – The best photo essays are the ones that go past the obvious and dig deeper in the story, going behind the scenes, or examining a day in the life of the subject matter – that’s what pulls in the spectator.
• Nail the technique – Even if the concept and the story are the most important part of a photo essay, it won’t have the same success if it’s poorly executed.
• Build a structure – A photo essay is about telling a thought-provoking story – so, think about it in a narrative way. Which images are going to introduce the topic? Which ones represent a climax? How is it going to end – how do you want the viewer to feel after seeing your photo series?
• Make strong choices – If you really want to convey an emotion and a unique point of view, you’re going to need to make some hard decisions. Which light are you using? Which lens? How many images will there be in the series? etc., and most importantly for a great photo essay is the why behind those choices.

9 Tips for Creating a Photo Essay

Credit: Laura James

1. Choose something you know

To make a good photo essay, you don’t need to travel to an exotic location or document a civil war – I mean, it’s great if you can, but you can start close to home.

Depending on the type of photography you do and the topic you’re looking for in your photographic essay, you can photograph a local event or visit an abandoned building outside your town.

It will be much easier for you to find a unique perspective and tell a better story if you’re already familiar with the subject. Also, consider that you might have to return a few times to the same location to get all the photos you need.

2. Follow your passion

Most photo essays take dedication and passion. If you choose a subject that might be easy, but you’re not really into it – the results won’t be as exciting. Taking photos will always be easier and more fun if you’re covering something you’re passionate about.

3. Take your time

A great photo essay is not done in a few hours. You need to put in the time to research it, conceptualizing it, editing, etc. That’s why I previously recommended following your passion because it takes a lot of dedication, and if you’re not passionate about it – it’s difficult to push through.

4. Write a summary or statement

Photo essays are always accompanied by some text. You can do this in the form of an introduction, write captions for each photo or write it as a conclusion. That’s up to you and how you want to present the work.

5. Learn from the masters

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Making a photographic essay takes a lot of practice and knowledge. A great way to become a better photographer and improve your storytelling skills is by studying the work of others. You can go to art shows, review books and magazines and look at the winners in photo contests – most of the time, there’s a category for photo series.

6. Get a wide variety of photos

Think about a story – a literary one. It usually tells you where the story is happening, who is the main character, and it gives you a few details to make you engage with it, right?

The same thing happens with a visual story in a photo essay – you can do some wide-angle shots to establish the scenes and some close-ups to show the details. Make a shot list to ensure you cover all the different angles.

Some of your pictures should guide the viewer in, while others are more climatic and regard the experience they are taking out of your photos.

7. Follow a consistent look

Both in style and aesthetics, all the images in your series need to be coherent. You can achieve this in different ways, from the choice of lighting, the mood, the post-processing, etc.

8. Be self-critical

Once you have all the photos, make sure you edit them with a good dose of self-criticism. Not all the pictures that you took belong in the photo essay. Choose only the best ones and make sure they tell the full story.

9. Ask for constructive feedback

Often, when we’re working on a photo essay project for a long time, everything makes perfect sense in our heads. However, someone outside the project might not be getting the idea. It’s important that you get honest and constructive criticism to improve your photography.

How to Create a Photo Essay in 5 Steps

Credit: Quang Nguyen Vinh

1. Choose your topic

This is the first step that you need to take to decide if your photo essay is going to be narrative or thematic. Then, choose what is it going to be about?

Ideally, it should be something that you’re interested in, that you have something to say about it, and it can connect with other people.

2. Research your topic

To tell a good story about something, you need to be familiar with that something. This is especially true when you want to go deeper and make a compelling photo essay. Day in the life photo essays are a popular choice, since often, these can be performed with friends and family, whom you already should know well.

3. Plan your photoshoot

Depending on what you’re photographing, this step can be very different from one project to the next. For a fine art project, you might need to find a location, props, models, a shot list, etc., while a documentary photo essay is about planning the best time to do the photos, what gear to bring with you, finding a local guide, etc.

Every photo essay will need different planning, so before taking pictures, put in the required time to get things right.

4. Experiment

It’s one thing to plan your photo shoot and having a shot list that you have to get, or else the photo essay won’t be complete. It’s another thing to miss out on some amazing photo opportunities that you couldn’t foresee.

So, be prepared but also stay open-minded and experiment with different settings, different perspectives, etc.

5. Make a final selection

Editing your work can be one of the hardest parts of doing a photo essay. Sometimes we can be overly critical, and others, we get attached to bad photos because we put a lot of effort into them or we had a great time doing them.

Try to be as objective as possible, don’t be afraid to ask for opinions and make various revisions before settling down on a final cut.

7 Photo Essay Topics, Ideas & Examples

Credit: Michelle Leman

• Architectural photo essay

Using architecture as your main subject, there are tons of photo essay ideas that you can do. For some inspiration, you can check out the work of Francisco Marin – who was trained as an architect and then turned to photography to “explore a different way to perceive things”.

You can also lookup Luisa Lambri. Amongst her series, you’ll find many photo essay examples in which architecture is the subject she uses to explore the relationship between photography and space.

• Process and transformation photo essay

This is one of the best photo essay topics for beginners because the story tells itself. Pick something that has a beginning and an end, for example, pregnancy, the metamorphosis of a butterfly, the life-cycle of a plant, etc.

Keep in mind that these topics are linear and give you an easy way into the narrative flow – however, it might be difficult to find an interesting perspective and a unique point of view.

• A day in the life of ‘X’ photo essay

There are tons of interesting photo essay ideas in this category – you can follow around a celebrity, a worker, your child, etc. You don’t even have to do it about a human subject – think about doing a photo essay about a day in the life of a racing horse, for example – find something that’s interesting for you.

• Time passing by photo essay

It can be a natural site or a landmark photo essay – whatever is close to you will work best as you’ll need to come back multiple times to capture time passing by. For example, how this place changes throughout the seasons or maybe even over the years.

A fun option if you live with family is to document a birthday party each year, seeing how the subject changes over time. This can be combined with a transformation essay or sorts, documenting the changes in interpersonal relationships over time.

• Travel photo essay

Do you want to make the jump from tourist snapshots into a travel photo essay? Research the place you’re going to be travelling to. Then, choose a topic.

If you’re having trouble with how to do this, check out any travel magazine – National Geographic, for example. They won’t do a generic article about Texas – they do an article about the beach life on the Texas Gulf Coast and another one about the diverse flavors of Texas.

The more specific you get, the deeper you can go with the story.

• Socio-political issues photo essay

This is one of the most popular photo essay examples – it falls under the category of photojournalism or documental photography. They are usually thematic, although it’s also possible to do a narrative one.

Depending on your topic of interest, you can choose topics that involve nature – for example, document the effects of global warming. Another idea is to photograph protests or make an education photo essay.

It doesn’t have to be a big global issue; you can choose something specific to your community – are there too many stray dogs? Make a photo essay about a local animal shelter. The topics are endless.

• Behind the scenes photo essay

A behind-the-scenes always make for a good photo story – people are curious to know what happens and how everything comes together before a show.

Depending on your own interests, this can be a photo essay about a fashion show, a theatre play, a concert, and so on. You’ll probably need to get some permissions, though, not only to shoot but also to showcase or publish those images.

4 Best Photo Essays in Recent times

Now that you know all the techniques about it, it might be helpful to look at some photo essay examples to see how you can put the concept into practice. Here are some famous photo essays from recent times to give you some inspiration.

Habibi by Antonio Faccilongo

This photo essay wan the World Press Photo Story of the Year in 2021. Faccilongo explores a very big conflict from a very specific and intimate point of view – how the Israeli-Palestinian war affects the families.

He chose to use a square format because it allows him to give order to things and eliminate unnecessary elements in his pictures.

With this long-term photo essay, he wanted to highlight the sense of absence and melancholy women and families feel towards their husbands away at war.

The project then became a book edited by Sarah Leen and the graphics of Ramon Pez.

Picture This: New Orleans by Mary Ellen Mark

The last assignment before her passing, Mary Ellen Mark travelled to New Orleans to register the city after a decade after Hurricane Katrina.

The images of the project “bring to life the rebirth and resilience of the people at the heart of this tale”, – says CNNMoney, commissioner of the work.

Each survivor of the hurricane has a story, and Mary Ellen Mark was there to record it. Some of them have heartbreaking stories about everything they had to leave behind.

Others have a story of hope – like Sam and Ben, two eight-year-olds born from frozen embryos kept in a hospital that lost power supply during the hurricane, yet they managed to survive.

Selfie by Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman is an American photographer whose work is mainly done through self-portraits. With them, she explores the concept of identity, gender stereotypes, as well as visual and cultural codes.

One of her latest photo essays was a collaboration with W Magazine entitled Selfie. In it, the author explores the concept of planned candid photos (‘plandid’).

The work was made for Instagram, as the platform is well known for the conflict between the ‘real self’ and the one people present online. Sherman started using Facetune, Perfect365 and YouCam to alter her appearance on selfies – in Photoshop, you can modify everything, but these apps were designed specifically to “make things prettier”- she says, and that’s what she wants to explore in this photo essay.

Tokyo Compression by Michael Wolf

Michael Wolf has an interest in the broad-gauge topic Life in Cities. From there, many photo essays have been derived – amongst them – Tokyo Compression .

He was horrified by the way people in Tokyo are forced to move to the suburbs because of the high prices of the city. Therefore, they are required to make long commutes facing 1,5 hours of train to start their 8+ hour workday followed by another 1,5 hours to get back home.

To portray this way of life, he photographed the people inside the train pressed against the windows looking exhausted, angry or simply absent due to this way of life.

You can visit his website to see other photo essays that revolve around the topic of life in megacities.

Final Words

It’s not easy to make photo essays, so don’t expect to be great at it right from your first project.

Start off small by choosing a specific subject that’s interesting to you –  that will come from an honest place, and it will be a great practice for some bigger projects along the line.

Whether you like to shoot still life or you’re a travel photographer, I hope these photo essay tips and photo essay examples can help you get started and grow in your photography.

Let us know which topics you are working on right now – we’ll love to hear from you!

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Ana Mireles is a Mexican researcher that specializes in photography and communications for the arts and culture sector.

Penelope G. To Ana Mireles Such a well written and helpful article for an writer who wants to inclue photo essay in her memoir. Thank you. I will get to work on this new skill. Penelope G.

Herman Krieger Photo essays in black and white

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23 Photo Essay Ideas and Examples (to Get Your Creative Juices Flowing!)

A Post By: Kevin Landwer-Johan

Looking for inspiration? Our 23 photo essay ideas will take your photography skills to new heights!

A single, strong photograph can convey a lot of information about its subject – but sometimes we have topics that require more than one image to do the job. That’s when it’s time to make a photo essay: a collection of pictures that together tell the bigger story around a chosen theme.

In the following sections, we’ll explore various photo essay ideas and examples that cover a wide range of subjects and purposes. From capturing the growth of your children to documenting local festivals, each idea offers an exciting opportunity to tell a story through your lens, whether you’re a hobbyist or a veteran professional.

So grab your camera, unleash your creativity, and let’s delve into the wonderful world of photo essay examples!

What is a photo essay?

Simply put, a photo essay is a series of carefully selected images woven together to tell a story or convey a message. Think of it as a visual narrative that designed to capture attention and spark emotions.

Now, these images can revolve around a broad theme or focus on a specific storyline. For instance, you might create a photo essay celebrating the joy of companionship by capturing 10 heartwarming pictures of people sharing genuine laughter. On the other hand, you could have a photo essay delving into the everyday lives of fishermen in Wales by following a single fisherman’s journey for a day or even a week.

It’s important to note that photo essays don’t necessarily have to stick to absolute truth. While some documentary photographers prefer to keep it authentic, others may employ techniques like manipulation or staging to create a more artistic impact. So there is room for creativity and interpretation.

Why you should create a photo essay

Photo essays have a way of expressing ideas and stories that words sometimes struggle to capture. They offer a visual narrative that can be incredibly powerful and impactful.

Firstly, photo essays are perfect when you have an idea or a point you want to convey, but you find yourself at a loss for words. Sometimes, emotions and concepts are better conveyed through images rather than paragraphs. So if you’re struggling to articulate a message, you can let your photos do the talking for you.

Second, if you’re interested in subjects that are highly visual, like the mesmerizing forms of architecture within a single city, photo essays are the way to go. Trying to describe the intricate details of a building or the play of light and shadows with words alone can be challenging. But through a series of captivating images, you can immerse your audience in the architecture.

And finally, if you’re aiming to evoke emotions or make a powerful statement, photo essays are outstanding. Images have an incredible ability to shock, inspire, and move people in ways that words often struggle to achieve. So if you want to raise awareness about an environmental issue or ignite a sense of empathy, a compelling series of photographs can have a profound impact.

Photo essay examples and ideas

Looking to create a photo essay but don’t know where to start? Here are some handy essay ideas and examples for inspiration!

1. A day in the life

Your first photo essay idea is simple: Track a life over the course of one day. You might make an essay about someone else’s life. Or the life of a location, such as the sidewalk outside your house. 

The subject matter you choose is up to you. But start in the morning and create a series of images showing your subject over the course of a typical day.

(Alternatively, you can document your subject on a special day, like a birthday, a wedding, or some other celebration.)

2. Capture hands

Portraits focus on a subject’s face – but why not mix it up and make a photo essay that focuses on your subject’s hands?

(You can also focus on a collection of different people’s hands.)

Hands can tell you a lot about a person. And showing them in context is a great way to narrate a story.

3. Follow a sports team for a full season

Sports are all about emotions – both from the passionate players and the dedicated fans. While capturing the intensity of a single game can be exhilarating, imagine the power of telling the complete story of a team throughout an entire season.

For the best results, you’ll need to invest substantial time in sports photography. Choose a team that resonates with you and ensure their games are within a drivable distance. By photographing their highs and lows, celebrations and challenges, you’ll create a compelling photo essay that traces their journey from the first game to the last.

4. A child and their parent

Photographs that catch the interaction between parents and children are special. A parent-child connection is strong and unique, so making powerful images isn’t challenging. You just need to be ready to capture the special moments as they happen. 

You might concentrate on a parent teaching their child. Or the pair playing sports. Or working on a special project.

Use your imagination, and you’ll have a great time with this theme.

5. Tell a local artist’s story 

I’ve always enjoyed photographing artists as they work; studios have a creative vibe, so the energy is already there. Bring your camera into this environment and try to tell the artist’s story!

An artist’s studio offers plenty of opportunities for wonderful photo essays. Think about the most fascinating aspects of the artist’s process. What do they do that makes their art special? Aim to show this in your photos.

Many people appreciate fine art, but they’re often not aware of what happens behind the scenes. So documenting an artist can produce fascinating visual stories.

6. Show a tradesperson’s process

Do you have a plumber coming over to fix your kitchen sink? Is a builder making you a new deck?

Take photos while they work! Tell them what you want to do before you start, and don’t forget to share your photos with them.

They’ll probably appreciate seeing what they do from another perspective. They may even want to use your photos on their company website.

7. Photograph your kids as they grow

There’s something incredibly special about documenting the growth of our little ones. Kids grow up so quickly – before you know it, they’re moving out. Why not capture the beautiful moments along the way by creating a heartwarming photo essay that showcases their growth?

There are various approaches you can take, but one idea is to capture regular photos of your kids standing in front of a distinct point of reference, such as the refrigerator. Over a year or several years, you can gather these images and place them side by side to witness your childrens’ incredible transformations.

8. Cover a local community event

A school fundraiser, a tree-planting day at a park, or a parade; these are are all community events that make for good photo essay ideas.

Think like a photojournalist . What type of images would your editor want? Make sure to capture some wide-angle compositions , some medium shots, and some close-ups.

(Getting in close to show the details can often tell as much of a story as the wider pictures.)

9. Show fresh market life

Markets are great for photography because there’s always plenty of activity and lots of characters. Think of how you can best illustrate the flow of life at the market. What are the vendors doing that’s most interesting? What are the habits of the shoppers?

Look to capture the essence of the place. Try to portray the people who work and shop there.

10. Shoot the same location over time

What location do you visit regularly? Is there a way you can make an interesting photo essay about it?

Consider what you find most attractive and ugly about the place. Look for aspects that change over time. 

Any outdoor location will look different throughout the day. Also think about the changes that occur from season to season. Create an essay that tells the story of the place.

11. Document a local festival

Festivals infuse cities and towns with vibrant energy and unique cultural experiences. Even if your own town doesn’t have notable festivals, chances are a neighboring town does. Explore the magic of these celebrations by documenting a local festival through your lens.

Immerse yourself in the festivities, arriving early and staying late. Capture the colorful displays and the people who make the festival come alive. If the festival spans multiple days, consider focusing on different areas each time you visit to create a diverse and comprehensive photo essay that truly reflects the essence of the event.

12. Photograph a garden through the seasons

It might be your own garden . It could be the neighbor’s. It could even be the garden at your local park.

Think about how the plants change during the course of a year. Capture photos of the most significant visual differences, then present them as a photo essay.

13. Show your local town or city

After spending several years in a particular area, you likely possess an intimate knowledge of your local town or city. Why not utilize that familiarity to create a captivating photo essay that showcases the essence of your community?

Delve into what makes your town special, whether it’s the charming streets, unique landmarks, or the people who shape its character. Dedicate time to capturing the diverse aspects that define your locale. If you’re up for a more extensive project, consider photographing the town over the course of an entire year, capturing the changing seasons and the dynamic spirit of your community.

14. Pick a local cause to highlight

Photo essays can go beyond passive documentation; they can become a part of your activism, too!

So find a cause that matters to you. Tell the story of some aspect of community life that needs improvement. Is there an ongoing issue with litter in your area? How about traffic; is there a problematic intersection?

Document these issues, then make sure to show the photos to people responsible for taking action.

15. Making a meal

Photo essay ideas can be about simple, everyday things – like making a meal or a coffee.

How can you creatively illustrate something that seems so mundane? My guess is that, when you put your mind to it, you can come up with many unique perspectives, all of which will make great stories.

16. Capture the life of a flower

In our fast-paced lives, it’s easy to overlook the beauty that surrounds us. Flowers, with their mesmerizing colors and rapid life cycles, offer a captivating subject for a photo essay. Try to slow down and appreciate the intricate details of a flower’s existence.

With a macro lens in hand, document a single flower or a patch of flowers from their initial shoots to their inevitable wilting and decomposition. Experiment with different angles and perspectives to bring viewers into the enchanting world of the flower. By freezing these fleeting moments, you’ll create a visual narrative that celebrates the cycle of life and the exquisite beauty found in nature’s delicate creations.

17. Religious traditions

Religion is often rich with visual expression in one form or another. So capture it!

Of course, you may need to narrow down your ideas and choose a specific aspect of worship to photograph. Aim to show what people do when they visit a holy place, or how they pray on their own. Illustrate what makes their faith real and what’s special about it.

18. Historic sites

Historic sites are often iconic, and plenty of photographers take a snapshot or two.

But with a photo essay, you can illustrate the site’s history in greater depth.

Look for details of the location that many visitors miss. And use these to build an interesting story.

19. Show the construction of a building

Ever been away from a familiar place for a while only to return and find that things have changed? It happens all the time, especially in areas undergoing constant development. So why not grab your camera and document this transformation?

Here’s the idea: Find a building that’s currently under construction in your area. It could be a towering skyscraper, a modern office complex, or even a small-scale residential project. Whatever catches your eye! Then let the magic of photography unfold.

Make it a habit to take a photo every day or two. Watch as the building gradually takes shape and evolves. Capture the construction workers in action, the cranes reaching for the sky, and the scaffolding supporting the structure.

Once the building is complete, you’ll have a treasure trove of images that chronicle its construction from start to finish!

20. Document the changing skyline of the city

This photo essay example is like the previous one, except it works on a much larger scale. Instead of photographing a single building as it’s built, find a nice vantage point outside your nearest city, then photograph the changing skyline.

To create a remarkable photo essay showcasing the changing skyline, you’ll need to scout out the perfect vantage point. Seek high ground that offers a commanding view of the city, allowing you to frame the skyline against the horizon. Look for spots that give you an unobstructed perspective, whether a rooftop terrace, a hillside park, or even a nearby bridge.

As you set out on your photography expedition, be patient and observant. Cities don’t transform overnight; they change gradually over time. Embrace the passage of days, weeks, and months as you witness the slow evolution unfold.

Pro tip: To capture the essence of this transformation, experiment with various photographic techniques. Play with different angles, framing, and compositions to convey the grandeur and dynamism of the changing skyline. Plus, try shooting during the golden hours of sunrise and sunset , when the soft light bathes the city in a warm glow and accentuates the architectural details.

21. Photograph your pet

If you’re a pet owner, you already have the perfect subject for a photo essay!

All pets , with the possible exception of pet rocks, will provide you with a collection of interesting moments to photograph.

So collect these moments with your camera – then display them as a photo essay showing the nature and character of your pet.

22. Tell the story of a local nature preserve

Ah, the wonders of a local nature preserve! While it may not boast the grandeur of Yosemite National Park, these hidden gems hold their own beauty, just waiting to be discovered and captured through the lens of your camera.

To embark on this type of photo essay adventure, start by exploring all the nooks and crannies of your chosen nature preserve. Wander along its winding trails, keeping an eye out for unique and captivating subjects that convey the essence of the preserve.

As you go along, try to photograph the intricate details of delicate wildflowers, the interplay of light filtering through a dense forest canopy, and the lively activities of birds and other wildlife.

23. Show the same subject from multiple perspectives

It’s possible to create an entire photo essay in a single afternoon – or even in a handful of minutes. If you don’t love the idea of dedicating yourself to days of photographing for a single essay, this is a great option.

Simply find a subject you like, then endeavor to capture 10 unique images that include it. I’d recommend photographing from different angles: up above, down low, from the right and left. You can also try getting experimental with creative techniques, such as intentional camera movement and freelensing. If all goes well, you’ll have a very cool set of images featuring one of your favorite subjects!

By showcasing the same subject from multiple perspectives, you invite viewers on a visual journey. They get to see different facets, textures, and details that they might have overlooked in a single photograph. It adds depth and richness to your photo essay, making it both immersive and dynamic.

Photo essay ideas: final words

Remember: Photo essays are all about communicating a concept or a story through images rather than words. So embrace the process and use images to express yourself!

Whether you choose to follow a sports team through a thrilling season, document the growth of your little ones, or explore the hidden treasures of your local town, each photo essay has its own magic waiting to be unlocked. It’s a chance to explore your creativity and create images in your own style.

So look at the world around you. Grab your gear and venture out into the wild. Embrace the beauty of nature, the energy of a bustling city, or the quiet moments that make life special. Consider what you see every day. What aspects interest you the most? Photograph those things.

You’re bound to end up with some amazing photo essays!

Now over to you:

Do you have any photo essay examples you’re proud of? Do you have any more photo essay ideas? Share your thoughts and images in the comments below!

Read more from our Tips & Tutorials category

Kevin Landwer-Johan is a photographer, photography teacher, and author with over 30 years of experience that he loves to share with others.

Check out his website and his Buy Me a Coffee page .

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What is a Photo Essay? 9 Photo Essay Examples You Can Recreate

A photo essay is a series of photographs that tell a story. Unlike a written essay, a photo essay focuses on visuals instead of words. With a photo essay, you can stretch your creative limits and explore new ways to connect with your audience. Whatever your photography skill level, you can recreate your own fun and creative photo essay.

9 Photo Essay Examples You Can Recreate

• Photowalk Photo Essay
• Transformation Photo Essay
• Day in the Life Photo Essay
• Event Photo Essay
• Building Photo Essay
• Historic Site or Landmark Photo Essay
• Behind the Scenes Photo Essay
• Family Photo Essay
• Education Photo Essay

Stories are important to all of us. While some people gravitate to written stories, others are much more attuned to visual imagery. With a photo essay, you can tell a story without writing a word. Your use of composition, contrast, color, and perspective in photography will convey ideas and evoke emotions.

To explore narrative photography, you can use basic photographic equipment. You can buy a camera or even use your smartphone to get started. While lighting, lenses, and post-processing software can enhance your photos, they aren’t necessary to achieve good results.

Whether you need to complete a photo essay assignment or want to pursue one for fun or professional purposes, you can use these photo essay ideas for your photography inspiration . Once you know the answer to “what is a photo essay?” and find out how fun it is to create one, you’ll likely be motivated to continue your forays into photographic storytelling.

1 . Photowalk Photo Essay

One popular photo essay example is a photowalk. Simply put, a photowalk is time you set aside to walk around a city, town, or a natural site and take photos. Some cities even have photowalk tours led by professional photographers. On these tours, you can learn the basics about how to operate your camera, practice photography composition techniques, and understand how to look for unique shots that help tell your story.

Set aside at least two to three hours for your photowalk. Even if you’re photographing a familiar place—like your own home town—try to look at it through new eyes. Imagine yourself as a first-time visitor or pretend you’re trying to educate a tourist about the area.

Walk around slowly and look for different ways to capture the mood and energy of your location. If you’re in a city, capture wide shots of streets, close-ups of interesting features on buildings, street signs, and candid shots of people. Look for small details that give the city character and life. And try some new concepts—like reflection picture ideas—by looking for opportunities to photographs reflections in mirrored buildings, puddles, fountains, or bodies of water.

2 . Transformation Photo Essay

With a transformation photography essay, you can tell the story about change over time. One of the most popular photostory examples, a transformation essay can document a mom-to-be’s pregnancy or a child’s growth from infancy into the toddler years. But people don’t need to be the focus of a transformation essay. You can take photos of a house that is being built or an urban area undergoing revitalization.

You can also create a photo narrative to document a short-term change. Maybe you want to capture images of your growing garden or your move from one home to another. These examples of photo essays are powerful ways of telling the story of life’s changes—both large and small.

3 . Day in the Life Photo Essay

Want a unique way to tell a person’s story? Or, perhaps you want to introduce people to a career or activity. You may want to consider a day in the life essay.

With this photostory example, your narrative focuses on a specific subject for an entire day. For example, if you are photographing a farmer, you’ll want to arrive early in the morning and shadow the farmer as he or she performs daily tasks. Capture a mix of candid shots of the farmer at work and add landscapes and still life of equipment for added context. And if you are at a farm, don’t forget to get a few shots of the animals for added character, charm, or even a dose of humor. These types of photography essay examples are great practice if you are considering pursuing photojournalism. They also help you learn and improve your candid portrait skills.

4 . Event Photo Essay

Events are happening in your local area all the time, and they can make great photo essays. With a little research, you can quickly find many events that you could photograph. There may be bake sales, fundraisers, concerts, art shows, farm markets, block parties, and other non profit event ideas . You could also focus on a personal event, such as a birthday or graduation.

At most events, your primary emphasis will be on capturing candid photos of people in action. You can also capture backgrounds or objects to set the scene. For example, at a birthday party, you’ll want to take photos of the cake and presents.

For a local or community event, you can share your photos with the event organizer. Or, you may be able to post them on social media and tag the event sponsor. This is a great way to gain recognition and build your reputation as a talented photographer.

5. Building Photo Essay

Many buildings can be a compelling subject for a photographic essay. Always make sure that you have permission to enter and photograph the building. Once you do, look for interesting shots and angles that convey the personality, purpose, and history of the building. You may also be able to photograph the comings and goings of people that visit or work in the building during the day.

Some photographers love to explore and photograph abandoned buildings. With these types of photos, you can provide a window into the past. Definitely make sure you gain permission before entering an abandoned building and take caution since some can have unsafe elements and structures.

6. Historic Site or Landmark Photo Essay

Taking a series of photos of a historic site or landmark can be a great experience. You can learn to capture the same site from different angles to help portray its character and tell its story. And you can also photograph how people visit and engage with the site or landmark. Take photos at different times of day and in varied lighting to capture all its nuances and moods.

You can also use your photographic essay to help your audience understand the history of your chosen location. For example, if you want to provide perspective on the Civil War, a visit to a battleground can be meaningful. You can also visit a site when reenactors are present to share insight on how life used to be in days gone by.

7 . Behind the Scenes Photo Essay

Another fun essay idea is taking photos “behind the scenes” at an event. Maybe you can chronicle all the work that goes into a holiday festival from the early morning set-up to the late-night teardown. Think of the lead event planner as the main character of your story and build the story about him or her.

Or, you can go backstage at a drama production. Capture photos of actors and actresses as they transform their looks with costuming and makeup. Show the lead nervously pacing in the wings before taking center stage. Focus the work of stagehands, lighting designers, and makeup artists who never see the spotlight but bring a vital role in bringing the play to life.

8. Family Photo Essay

If you enjoy photographing people, why not explore photo story ideas about families and relationships? You can focus on interactions between two family members—such as a father and a daughter—or convey a message about a family as a whole.

Sometimes these type of photo essays can be all about the fun and joy of living in a close-knit family. But sometimes they can be powerful portraits of challenging social topics. Images of a family from another country can be a meaningful photo essay on immigration. You could also create a photo essay on depression by capturing families who are coping with one member’s illness.

For these projects on difficult topics, you may want to compose a photo essay with captions. These captions can feature quotes from family members or document your own observations. Although approaching hard topics isn’t easy, these types of photos can have lasting impact and value.

9. Education Photo Essay

Opportunities for education photo essays are everywhere—from small preschools to community colleges and universities. You can seek permission to take photos at public or private schools or even focus on alternative educational paths, like homeschooling.

Your education photo essay can take many forms. For example, you can design a photo essay of an experienced teacher at a high school. Take photos of him or her in action in the classroom, show quiet moments grading papers, and capture a shared laugh between colleagues in the teacher’s lounge.

Alternatively, you can focus on a specific subject—such as science and technology. Or aim to portray a specific grade level, document activities club or sport, or portray the social environment. A photo essay on food choices in the cafeteria can be thought-provoking or even funny. There are many potential directions to pursue and many great essay examples.

While education is an excellent topic for a photo essay for students, education can be a great source of inspiration for any photographer.

Why Should You Create a Photo Essay?

Ultimately, photographers are storytellers. Think of what a photographer does during a typical photo shoot. He or she will take a series of photos that helps convey the essence of the subject—whether that is a person, location, or inanimate object. For example, a family portrait session tells the story of a family—who they are, their personalities, and the closeness of their relationship.

Learning how to make a photo essay can help you become a better storyteller—and a better photographer. You’ll cultivate key photography skills that you can carry with you no matter where your photography journey leads.

If you simply want to document life’s moments on social media, you may find that a single picture doesn’t always tell the full story. Reviewing photo essay examples and experimenting with your own essay ideas can help you choose meaningful collections of photos to share with friends and family online.

Learning how to create photo essays can also help you work towards professional photography ambitions. You’ll often find that bloggers tell photographic stories. For example, think of cooking blogs that show you each step in making a recipe. Photo essays are also a mainstay of journalism. You’ll often find photo essays examples in many media outlets—everywhere from national magazines to local community newspapers. And the best travel photographers on Instagram tell great stories with their photos, too.

With a photo essay, you can explore many moods and emotions. Some of the best photo essays tell serious stories, but some are humorous, and others aim to evoke action.

You can raise awareness with a photo essay on racism or a photo essay on poverty. A photo essay on bullying can help change the social climate for students at a school. Or, you can document a fun day at the beach or an amusement park. You have control of the themes, photographic elements, and the story you want to tell.

5 Steps to Create a Photo Essay

Every photo essay will be different, but you can use a standard process. Following these five steps will guide you through every phase of your photo essay project—from brainstorming creative essay topics to creating a photo essay to share with others.

Step 1: Choose Your Photo Essay Topics

Just about any topic you can imagine can form the foundation for a photo essay. You may choose to focus on a specific event, such as a wedding, performance, or festival. Or you may want to cover a topic over a set span of time, such as documenting a child’s first year. You could also focus on a city or natural area across the seasons to tell a story of changing activities or landscapes.

Since the best photo essays convey meaning and emotion, choose a topic of interest. Your passion for the subject matter will shine through each photograph and touch your viewer’s hearts and minds.

Step 2: Conduct Upfront Research

Much of the work in a good-quality photo essay begins before you take your first photo. It’s always a good idea to do some research on your planned topic.

Imagine you’re going to take photos of a downtown area throughout the year. You should spend some time learning the history of the area. Talk with local residents and business owners and find out about planned events. With these insights, you’ll be able to plan ahead and be prepared to take photos that reflect the area’s unique personality and lifestyles.

For any topic you choose, gather information first. This may involve internet searches, library research, interviews, or spending time observing your subject.

Step 3: Storyboard Your Ideas

After you have done some research and have a good sense of the story you want to tell, you can create a storyboard. With a storyboard, you can write or sketch out the ideal pictures you want to capture to convey your message.

You can turn your storyboard into a “shot list” that you can bring with you on site. A shot list can be especially helpful when you are at a one-time event and want to capture specific shots for your photo essay. If you’ve never created a photo essay before, start with ten shot ideas. Think of each shot as a sentence in your story. And aim to make each shot evoke specific ideas or emotions.

Step 4: Capture Images

Your storyboard and shot list will be important guides to help you make the most of each shoot. Be sure to set aside enough time to capture all the shots you need—especially if you are photographing a one-time event. And allow yourself to explore your ideas using different photography composition, perspective, and color contrast techniques.

You may need to take a hundred images or more to get ten perfect ones for your photographic essay. Or, you may find that you want to add more photos to your story and expand your picture essay concept.

Also, remember to look for special unplanned, moments that help tell your story. Sometimes, spontaneous photos that aren’t on your shot list can be full of meaning. A mix of planning and flexibility almost always yields the best results.

Step 5: Edit and Organize Photos to Tell Your Story

After capturing your images, you can work on compiling your photo story. To create your photo essay, you will need to make decisions about which images portray your themes and messages. At times, this can mean setting aside beautiful images that aren’t a perfect fit. You can use your shot list and storyboard as a guide but be open to including photos that weren’t in your original plans.

You may want to use photo editing software—such as Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop— to enhance and change photographs. With these tools, you can adjust lighting and white balance, perform color corrections, crop, or perform other edits. If you have a signature photo editing style, you may want to use Photoshop Actions or Lightroom Presets to give all your photos a consistent look and feel.

You order a photo book from one of the best photo printing websites to publish your photo story. You can add them to an album on a photo sharing site, such as Flickr or Google Photos. Also, you could focus on building a website dedicated to documenting your concepts through visual photo essays. If so, you may want to use SEO for photographers to improve your website’s ranking in search engine results. You could even publish your photo essay on social media. Another thing to consider is whether you want to include text captures or simply tell your story through photographs.

Choose the medium that feels like the best space to share your photo essay ideas and vision with your audiences. You should think of your photo essay as your own personal form of art and expression when deciding where and how to publish it.

Photo Essays Can Help You Become a Better Photographer

Whatever your photography ambitions may be, learning to take a photo essay can help you grow. Even simple essay topics can help you gain skills and stretch your photographic limits. With a photo essay, you start to think about how a series of photographs work together to tell a complete story. You’ll consider how different shots work together, explore options for perspective and composition, and change the way you look at the world.

Before you start taking photos, you should review photo essay examples. You can find interesting pictures to analyze and photo story examples online, in books, or in classic publications, like Life Magazine . Don’t forget to look at news websites for photojournalism examples to broaden your perspective. This review process will help you in brainstorming simple essay topics for your first photo story and give you ideas for the future as well.

Ideas and inspiration for photo essay topics are everywhere. You can visit a park or go out into your own backyard to pursue a photo essay on nature. Or, you can focus on the day in the life of someone you admire with a photo essay of a teacher, fireman, or community leader. Buildings, events, families, and landmarks are all great subjects for concept essay topics. If you are feeling stuck coming up with ideas for essays, just set aside a few hours to walk around your city or town and take photos. This type of photowalk can be a great source of material.

You’ll soon find that advanced planning is critical to your success. Brainstorming topics, conducting research, creating a storyboard, and outlining a shot list can help ensure you capture the photos you need to tell your story. After you’ve finished shooting, you’ll need to decide where to house your photo essay. You may need to come up with photo album title ideas, write captions, and choose the best medium and layout.

Without question, creating a photo essay can be a valuable experience for any photographer. That’s true whether you’re an amateur completing a high school assignment or a pro looking to hone new skills. You can start small with an essay on a subject you know well and then move into conquering difficult ideas. Maybe you’ll want to create a photo essay on mental illness or a photo essay on climate change. Or maybe there’s another cause that is close to your heart.

Whatever your passion, you can bring it to life with a photo essay.

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Photo Essay

We all know that photographs tell a story. These still images may be seen from various perspectives and are interpreted in different ways. Oftentimes, photographers like to give dramatic meaning to various scenarios. For instance, a blooming flower signifies a new life. Photographs always hold a deeper meaning than what they actually are.

In essay writing , photographs along with its supporting texts, play a significant role in conveying a message. Here are some examples of these kinds of photo-text combinations.

What is Photo Essay? A photo essay is a visual storytelling method that utilizes a sequence of carefully curated photographs to convey a narrative, explore a theme, or evoke specific emotions. It goes beyond individual images, aiming to tell a cohesive and impactful story through the arrangement and combination of pictures.

Photo Essay Format

A photo essay is a series of photographs that are intended to tell a story or evoke a series of emotions in the viewer. It is a powerful way to convey messages without the need for many words. Here is a format to guide you in creating an effective photo essay:

1. Choose a Compelling Topic

Select a subject that you are passionate about or that you find intriguing. Ensure the topic has a clear narrative that can be expressed visually.

2. Plan Your Shots

Outline the story you wish to tell. This could involve a beginning, middle, and end or a thematic approach. Decide on the types of shots you need (e.g., wide shots, close-ups, portraits, action shots) to best tell the story.

3. Take Your Photographs

Capture a variety of images to have a wide selection when editing your essay. Focus on images that convey emotion, tell a story, or highlight your theme.

4. Edit Your Photos

Select the strongest images that best convey your message or story. Edit for consistency in style, color, and lighting to ensure the essay flows smoothly.

5. Arrange Your Photos

Order your images in a way that makes sense narratively or thematically. Consider transitions between photos to ensure they lead the viewer naturally through the story.

6. Include Captions or Text (Optional)

Write captions to provide context, add depth, or explain the significance of each photo. Keep text concise and impactful, letting the images remain the focus.

7. Present Your Photo Essay

Choose a platform for presentation, whether online, in a gallery, or as a printed booklet. Consider the layout and design, ensuring that it complements and enhances the visual narrative.

8. Conclude with Impact

End with a strong image or a conclusion that encapsulates the essence of your essay. Leave the viewer with something to ponder , reflecting on the message or emotions you aimed to convey.

Best Photo Essay Example?

One notable example of a powerful photo essay is “The Photographic Essay: Paul Fusco’s ‘RFK Funeral Train'” by Paul Fusco. This photo essay captures the emotional journey of the train carrying the body of Robert F. Kennedy from New York to Washington, D.C., after his assassination in 1968. Fusco’s images beautifully and poignantly document the mourning and respect shown by people along the train route. The series is a moving portrayal of grief, unity, and the impact of a historical moment on the lives of ordinary individuals. The photographs are both artistically compelling and deeply human, making it a notable example of the potential for photo essays to convey complex emotions and historical narratives.

Photo Essay Examples and Ideas to Edit & Download

• A Day in the Life Photo Essay
• Behind the scenes Photo Essay
• Event Photo Essay
• Photo Essay on Meal
• Photo Essay on Photo walking
• Photo Essay on Protest
• Photo Essay on Abandoned building
• Education photo essay
• Photo Essay on Events
• Follow the change Photo Essay
• Photo Essay on Personal experiences

Photo Essay Examples & Templates

1. narrative photo essay format example.

nytimes.com

2. Student Photo Essay Example

3. Great Depression Essay Example

thshistory.files.wordpress.com

4. Example of Photo Essay

weresearchit.co.uk

5. Photo Essay Examples About Nature

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6. Travel Photo Example

theguardian.com

7. Free Photo Essay Example

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Most Interesting Photo Essays of 2019

Now that you are educated with the fundamentals of photo essays, why not lay eyes on some great photo essays for inspiration. To give you a glimpse of a few epitomes, we collected the best and fascinating photo essays for you. The handpicked samples are as follows:

8. Toys and Us

journals.openedition.org

This photo essay presents its subject which is the latest genre of photography, toy photography. In this type of picture taking, the photographer aims to give life on the toys and treat them as his/her model. This photography follows the idea of a toy researcher, Katrina Heljakka, who states that also adults and not only children are interested in reimagining and preserving the characters of their toys with the means of roleplay and creating a story about these toys. This photo essay is based on the self-reflection of the author on a friend’s toys in their home environment.

9. The Faces of Nature Example

godandnature.asa3.org

This photo essay and collection caters the creativity of the author’s mind in seeing the world. In her composition, she justified that there are millions of faces that are naturally made that some of us have not noticed. She also presented tons of photos showing different natural objects that form patterns of faces. Though it was not mentioned in the essay itself, the author has unconsciously showcased the psychological phenomenon, pareidolia. This is the tendency to translate an obscure stimulus that let the observer see faces in inanimate objects or abstract patterns, or even hearing concealed messages in music.

10. The Country Doctor Example

us1.campaign-archive.com

This photo essay depicts the medical hardships in a small rural town in Colorado called Kremling. For 23 days, Smith shadowed Dr. Ernest Ceriani, witnessing the dramatic life of the small town and capturing the woeful crisis of the region. The picture in this photographic essay was photographed by Smith himself for Life magazine in 1948 but remained as fascinating as it was posted weeks ago.

11. New York City Coffeehouses

lens.blogs.nytimes.com

Café Latte, cappuccino, espresso, or flat white—of course, you know these if you have visited a coffee shop at least once. However, the photographer of this photo essay took it to a whole new level of experience. Within two to three days of visiting various coffee places, Mr. Gavrysh stayed most of his day observing at the finest details such as the source of the coffee, the procedure of delivering them, and the process of roasting and grounding them. He also watched how did the baristas perfect the drinks and the reaction of the customers as they received their ordered coffee with delights in their faces. Gavrysh did not mean to compose a coffeehouse guide, but to make a composition that describes modern, local places where coffee is sipped and treated with respect.

12. Hungry Planet: What The World Eats

13. Photo Essay Example

cah.utexas.edu

14. Photo Essay in PDF

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15. Sample Photo Essay Example

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16. Basic Photo Essay Example

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17. Printable Photo Essay Example

One of the basic necessity of a person to live according to his/her will is food. In this photo essay, you will see how these necessities vary in several ways. In 2005, a pair of Peter Menzel and Faith D’ Aluisio released a book that showcased the meals of an average family in 24 countries. Ecuador, south-central Mali, China, Mexico, Kuwait, Norway, and Greenland are among the nations they visited.  This photo essay is written to raise awareness about the influence of environment and culture to the cost and calories of the foods laid on the various dining tables across the globe.

Photo essays are not just about photographic aesthetics but also the stories that authors built behind those pictures. In this collection of captivating photo essays, reflect on how to write your own. If you are allured and still can’t get enough, there’s no need for you to be frantic about. Besides, there are thousands of samples and templates on our website to browse. Visit us to check them all out.

What are good topics for a photo essay?

• Urban Exploration: Document the unique architecture, street life, and cultural diversity of urban environments.
• Environmental Conservation: Capture the beauty of natural landscapes or document environmental issues, showcasing the impact of climate change or conservation efforts.
• Everyday Life in Your Community: Showcase the daily lives, traditions, and activities of people in your local community.
• Family Traditions: Document the customs, rituals, and special moments within your own family or another family.
• Youth Culture: Explore the lifestyle, challenges, and aspirations of young people in your community or around the world.
• Behind-the-Scenes at an Event: Provide a backstage look at the preparation and execution of an event, such as a concert, festival, or sports competition.
• A Day in the Life of a Profession: Follow a professional in their daily activities, offering insights into their work, challenges, and routines.
• Social Issues: Address important social issues like homelessness, poverty, immigration, or healthcare, raising awareness through visual storytelling.
• Cultural Celebrations: Document cultural festivals, ceremonies, or celebrations that showcase the diversity of traditions in your region or beyond.
• Education Around the World: Explore the various facets of education globally, from classrooms to the challenges students face in different cultures.
• Workplace Dynamics: Capture the atmosphere, interactions, and diversity within different workplaces or industries.
• Street Art and Graffiti: Document the vibrant and dynamic world of street art, capturing the expressions of local artists.
• Animal Rescues or Shelters: Focus on the efforts of organizations or individuals dedicated to rescuing and caring for animals.
• Migration Stories: Explore the experiences and challenges of individuals or communities affected by migration.
• Global Food Culture: Document the diversity of food cultures, from local markets to family meals, showcasing the role of food in different societies.

How to Write a Photo Essay

First of all, you would need to find a topic that you are interested in. With this, you can conduct thorough research on the topic that goes beyond what is common. This would mean that it would be necessary to look for facts that not a lot of people know about. Not only will this make your essay interesting, but this may also help you capture the necessary elements for your images.

Remember, the ability to manipulate the emotions of your audience will allow you to build a strong connection with them. Knowing this, you need to plan out your shots. With the different emotions and concepts in mind, your images should tell a story along with the essay outline .

1. Choose Your Topic

• Select a compelling subject that interests you and can be explored visually.
• Consider the story or message you want to convey. It should be something that can be expressed through images.

2. Plan Your Essay

• Outline your narrative. Decide if your photo essay will tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end, or if it will explore a theme or concept.
• Research your subject if necessary, especially if you’re covering a complex or unfamiliar topic.

3. Capture Your Images

• Take a variety of photos. Include wide shots to establish the setting, close-ups to show details, and medium shots to focus on subjects.
• Consider different angles and perspectives to add depth and interest to your essay.
• Shoot more than you need. Having a large selection of images to choose from will make the editing process easier.

4. Select Your Images

• Choose photos that best tell your story or convey your theme.
• Look for images that evoke emotion or provoke thought.
• Ensure there’s a mix of compositions to keep the viewer engaged.
• Sequence your images in a way that makes narrative or thematic sense.
• Consider the flow and how each image transitions to the next.
• Use juxtaposition to highlight contrasts or similarities.

6. Add Captions or Text (Optional)

• Write captions to provide context or additional information about each photo. Keep them brief and impactful.
• Consider including an introduction or conclusion to frame your essay. This can be helpful in setting the stage or offering a final reflection.

7. Edit and Refine

• Review the sequence of your photos. Make sure they flow smoothly and clearly convey your intended story or theme.
• Adjust the layout as needed, ensuring that the visual arrangement is aesthetically pleasing and supports the narrative.

8. Share Your Essay

• Choose the right platform for your photo essay, whether it’s a blog, online publication, exhibition, or print.
• Consider your audience and tailor the presentation of your essay to suit their preferences and expectations.

Types of Photo Essay

Photo essays are a compelling medium to tell a story, convey emotions, or present a perspective through a series of photographs. Understanding the different types of photo essays can help photographers and storytellers choose the best approach for their project. Here are the main types of photo essays:

1. Narrative Photo Essays

• Purpose: To tell a story or narrate an event in a chronological sequence.
• Characteristics: Follows a clear storyline with a beginning, middle, and end. It often includes characters, a setting, and a plot.
• Examples: A day in the life of a firefighter, the process of crafting traditional pottery.

2. Thematic Photo Essays

• Purpose: To explore a specific theme, concept, or issue without being bound to a chronological sequence.
• Characteristics: Centers around a unified theme, with each photo contributing to the overall concept.
• Examples: The impact of urbanization on the environment, the beauty of natural landscapes.

3. Conceptual Photo Essays

• Purpose: To convey an idea or evoke a series of emotions through abstract or metaphorical images.
• Characteristics: Focuses on delivering a conceptual message or emotional response, often using symbolism.
• Examples: Loneliness in the digital age, the concept of freedom.

4. Expository or Informative Photo Essays

• Purpose: To inform or educate the viewer about a subject with a neutral viewpoint.
• Characteristics: Presents factual information on a topic, often accompanied by captions or brief texts to provide context.
• Examples: The process of coffee production, a day at an animal rescue center.

5. Persuasive Photo Essays

• Purpose: To convince the viewer of a particular viewpoint or to highlight social issues.
• Characteristics: Designed to persuade or elicit action, these essays may focus on social, environmental, or political issues.
• Examples: The effects of plastic pollution, the importance of historical preservation.

6. Personal Photo Essays

• Purpose: To express the photographer’s personal experiences, emotions, or journeys.
• Characteristics: Highly subjective and personal, often reflecting the photographer’s intimate feelings or experiences.
• Examples: A personal journey through grief, documenting one’s own home during quarantine.

7. Environmental Photo Essays

• Purpose: To showcase landscapes, wildlife, and environmental issues.
• Characteristics: Focuses on the natural world or environmental challenges, aiming to raise awareness or appreciation.
• Examples: The melting ice caps, wildlife in urban settings.

8. Travel Photo Essays

• Purpose: To explore and present the culture, landscapes, people, and experiences of different places.
• Characteristics: Captures the essence of a location, showcasing its uniqueness and the experiences of traveling.
• Examples: A road trip across the American Southwest, the vibrant streets of a bustling city.

How do you start a picture essay?

1. choose a compelling theme or topic:.

Select a theme or topic that resonates with you and has visual storytelling potential. It could be a personal project, an exploration of a social issue, or a visual journey through a specific place or event.

2. Research and Conceptualize:

Conduct research on your chosen theme to understand its nuances, context, and potential visual elements. Develop a conceptual framework for your photo essay, outlining the key aspects you want to capture.

3. Define Your Storytelling Approach:

Determine how you want to convey your narrative. Consider whether your photo essay will follow a chronological sequence, a thematic structure, or a more abstract and conceptual approach.

4. Create a Shot List:

Develop a list of specific shots you want to include in your essay. This can help guide your photography and ensure you capture a diverse range of images that contribute to your overall narrative.

5. Plan the Introduction:

Think about how you want to introduce your photo essay. The first image or series of images should grab the viewer’s attention and set the tone for the narrative.

6. Consider the Flow:

Plan the flow of your photo essay, ensuring a logical progression of images that tells a cohesive and engaging story. Consider the emotional impact and visual variety as you sequence your photographs.

7. Shoot with Purpose:

Start capturing images with your conceptual framework in mind. Focus on images that align with your theme and contribute to the overall narrative. Look for moments that convey emotion, tell a story, or reveal aspects of your chosen subject.

8. Experiment with Perspectives and Techniques:

Explore different perspectives, compositions, and photographic techniques to add visual interest and depth to your essay. Consider using a variety of shots, including wide-angle, close-ups, and detail shots.

9. Write Descriptive Captions:

As you capture images, think about the accompanying captions. Captions should provide context, additional information, or insights that enhance the viewer’s understanding of each photograph.

What are the key elements of a photo essay?

1. Theme or Topic:

Clearly defined subject matter or theme that unifies the photographs and tells a cohesive story.

2. Narrative Structure:

An intentional narrative structure that guides the viewer through the photo essay, whether chronological, thematic, or conceptual.

3. Introduction:

A strong introduction that captures the viewer’s attention and sets the tone for the photo essay.

4. Captivating Images:

A series of high-quality and visually compelling images that effectively convey the chosen theme or story.

5. Variety of Shots:

A variety of shots, including wide-angle, close-ups, detail shots, and different perspectives, to add visual interest and depth.

6. Sequencing:

Careful sequencing of images to create a logical flow and emotional impact, guiding the viewer through the narrative.

7. Captions and Text:

Thoughtful captions or accompanying text that provide context, additional information, or insights, enhancing the viewer’s understanding.

8. Conclusion:

A concluding section that brings the photo essay to a satisfying close, leaving a lasting impression on the viewer.

Purpose of a Photo Essay

With good writing skills , a person is able to tell a story through words. However, adding images for your essay will give it the dramatic effect it needs. The photographs and the text work hand in hand to create something compelling enough to attract an audience.

This connection goes beyond something visual, as photo essays are also able to connect with an audience emotionally. This is to create an essay that is effective enough to relay a given message.

5 Tips for Creating a Photo Essay

• Don’t be afraid to experiment. Find the right angle and be dramatic with your description, just be creative.
• Pay attention to detail. Chances are, your audience will notice every single detail of your photograph.
• Shoot everything. Behind a single beautiful photo is a hundred more shots.
• Don’t think twice about editing. Editing is where the magic happens. It has the ability to add more drama to your images.
• Have fun. Don’t stress yourself out too much but instead, grow from your experience.

What is a photo essay for school?

A school photo essay is a visual storytelling project for educational purposes, typically assigned to students. It involves creating a narrative using a series of carefully curated photographs on a chosen theme.

How many pictures should be in a photo essay?

The number of pictures in a photo essay varies based on the chosen theme and narrative structure. It can range from a few impactful images to a more extensive series, typically around 10-20 photographs.

Is a photo essay a story?

Yes, a photo essay is a visual storytelling form. It uses a series of carefully curated photographs to convey a narrative, evoke emotions, or communicate a specific message or theme.

What makes a photo essay unforgettable?

An unforgettable photo essay is characterized by a powerful theme, emotionally resonant images, a well-crafted narrative structure, attention to detail, and a connection that leaves a lasting impact on viewers.

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17 Awesome Photo Essay Examples You Should Try Yourself

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If you’re looking for a photo essay example (or 17!), you’ve come to the right place. But what is the purpose of a photo essay? A photo essay is intended to tell a story or evoke emotion from the viewers through a series of photographs. They allow you to be creative and fully explore an idea. But how do you make one yourself? Here’s a list of photo essay examples. Choose one that you can easily do based on your photographic level and equipment.

Top 17 Photo Essay Examples

Here are some fantastic ideas to get you inspired to create your own photo essays!

17. Photograph a Protest

16. Transformation Photo Essays

15. Photograph the Same Place

14. Create a Photowalk

13. Follow the Change

12. Photograph a Local Event

11. Photograph an Abandoned Building

10. Behind the Scenes of a Photo Shoot

9. Capture Street Fashion

8. Landmark Photo Essay

7. Fathers & Children

6. A Day In the Life

5. Education Photo Essay

4. Fictitious Meals

3. Photograph Coffee Shops Using Cafenol

2. Photograph the Photographers

1. Capture the Neighbors

Photo essays tell stories. And there are plenty of amazingly interesting stories to tell! Photographing photo essays is a great way to practice your photography skills while having fun. You might even learn something! These photo essay examples are here to provide you with the inspiration to go out and tell your own stories through photos!

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Pictures That Tell Stories: Photo Essay Examples

Like any other type of artist, a photographer’s job is to tell a story through their pictures. While some of the most creative among us can invoke emotion or convey a thought with one single photo, the rest of us will rely on a photo essay.

In the following article, we’ll go into detail about what a photo essay is and how to craft one while providing some detailed photo essay examples.

What is a Photo Essay? 

A photo essay is a series of photographs that, when assembled in a particular order, tell a unique and compelling story. While some photographers choose only to use pictures in their presentations, others will incorporate captions, comments, or even full paragraphs of text to provide more exposition for the scene they are unfolding.

A photo essay is a well-established part of photojournalism and have been used for decades to present a variety of information to the reader. Some of the most famous photo essayists include Ansel Adams , W. Eugene Smith, and James Nachtwey. Of course, there are thousands of photo essay examples out there from which you can draw inspiration.

Why Consider Creating a Photo Essay?

As the old saying goes, “a picture is worth 1000 words.” This adage is, for many photographers, reason enough to hold a photo essay in particularly high regard.

For others, a photo essay allow them to take pictures that are already interesting and construct intricate, emotionally-charged tales out of them. For all photographers, it is yet another skill they can master to become better at their craft.

As you might expect, the photo essay have had a long history of being associated with photojournalism. From the Great Depression to Civil Rights Marches and beyond, many compelling stories have been told through a combination of images and text, or photos alone. A photo essay often evokes an intense reaction, whether artistic in nature or designed to prove a socio-political point.

Below, we’ll list some famous photo essay samples to further illustrate the subject.

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Famous Photo Essays

“The Great Depression” by Dorothea Lange – Shot and arranged in the 1930s, this famous photo essay still serves as a stark reminder of The Great Depression and Dust Bowl America . Beautifully photographed, the black and white images offer a bleak insight to one of the country’s most difficult times.

“The Vietnam War” by Philip Jones Griffiths – Many artists consider the Griffiths’ photo essay works to be some of the most important records of the war in Vietnam. His photographs and great photo essays are particularly well-remembered for going against public opinion and showing the suffering of the “other side,” a novel concept when it came to war photography.

Various American Natural Sites by Ansel Adams – Adams bought the beauty of nature home to millions, photographing the American Southwest and places like Yosemite National Park in a way that made the photos seem huge, imposing, and beautiful.

“Everyday” by Noah Kalina – Is a series of photographs arranged into a video. This photo essay features daily photographs of the artist himself, who began taking capturing the images when he was 19 and continued to do so for six years.

“Signed, X” by Kate Ryan – This is a powerful photo essay put together to show the long-term effects of sexual violence and assault. This photo essay is special in that it remains ongoing, with more subjects being added every year.

Common Types of Photo Essays

While a photo essay do not have to conform to any specific format or design, there are two “umbrella terms” under which almost all genres of photo essays tend to fall. A photo essay is thematic and narrative. In the following section, we’ll give some details about the differences between the two types, and then cover some common genres used by many artists.

⬥ Thematic 

A thematic photo essay speak on a specific subject. For instance, numerous photo essays were put together in the 1930s to capture the ruin of The Great Depression. Though some of these presentations followed specific people or families, they mostly told the “story” of the entire event. There is much more freedom with a thematic photo essay, and you can utilize numerous locations and subjects. Text is less common with these types of presentations.

⬥ Narrative 

A narrative photo essay is much more specific than thematic essays, and they tend to tell a much more direct story. For instance, rather than show a number of scenes from a Great Depression Era town, the photographer might show the daily life of a person living in Dust Bowl America. There are few rules about how broad or narrow the scope needs to be, so photographers have endless creative freedom. These types of works frequently utilize text.

Common Photo Essay Genres

Walk a City – This photo essay is when you schedule a time to walk around a city, neighborhood, or natural site with the sole goal of taking photos. Usually thematic in nature, this type of photo essay allows you to capture a specific place, it’s energy, and its moods and then pass them along to others.

The Relationship Photo Essay – The interaction between families and loved ones if often a fascinating topic for a photo essay. This photo essay genre, in particular, gives photographers an excellent opportunity to capture complex emotions like love and abstract concepts like friendship. When paired with introspective text, the results can be quite stunning. 

The Timelapse Transformation Photo Essay – The goal of a transformation photo essay is to capture the way a subject changes over time. Some people take years or even decades putting together a transformation photo essay, with subjects ranging from people to buildings to trees to particular areas of a city.

Going Behind The Scenes Photo Essay – Many people are fascinated by what goes on behind the scenes of big events. Providing the photographer can get access; to an education photo essay can tell a very unique and compelling story to their viewers with this photo essay.

Photo Essay of a Special Event – There are always events and occasions going on that would make an interesting subject for a photo essay. Ideas for this photo essay include concerts, block parties, graduations, marches, and protests. Images from some of the latter were integral to the popularity of great photo essays.

The Daily Life Photo Essay – This type of photo essay often focus on a single subject and attempt to show “a day in the life” of that person or object through the photographs. This type of photo essay can be quite powerful depending on the subject matter and invoke many feelings in the people who view them.

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Photo Essay Ideas and Examples

One of the best ways to gain a better understanding of photo essays is to view some photo essay samples. If you take the time to study these executions in detail, you’ll see just how photo essays can make you a better photographer and offer you a better “voice” with which to speak to your audience.

Some of these photo essay ideas we’ve already touched on briefly, while others will be completely new to you. 

Cover a Protest or March  

Some of the best photo essay examples come from marches, protests, and other events associated with movements or socio-political statements. Such events allow you to take pictures of angry, happy, or otherwise empowered individuals in high-energy settings. The photo essay narrative can also be further enhanced by arriving early or staying long after the protest has ended to catch contrasting images. 

Photograph a Local Event  

Whether you know it or not, countless unique and interesting events are happening in and around your town this year. Such events provide photographers new opportunities to put together a compelling photo essay. From ethnic festivals to historical events to food and beverage celebrations, there are many different ways to capture and celebrate local life.

Visit an Abandoned Site or Building  

Old homes and historical sites are rich with detail and can sometimes appear dilapidated, overgrown by weeds, or broken down by time. These qualities make them a dynamic and exciting subject. Many great photo essay works of abandoned homes use a mix of far-away shots, close-ups, weird angles, and unique lighting. Such techniques help set a mood that the audience can feel through the photographic essay.

Chronicle a Pregnancy

Few photo essay topics could be more personal than telling the story of a pregnancy. Though this photo essay example can require some preparation and will take a lot of time, the results of a photographic essay like this are usually extremely emotionally-charged and touching. In some cases, photographers will continue the photo essay project as the child grows as well.

Photograph Unique Lifestyles  

People all over the world are embracing society’s changes in different ways. People live in vans or in “tiny houses,” living in the woods miles away from everyone else, and others are growing food on self-sustaining farms. Some of the best photo essay works have been born out of these new, inspiring movements.

Photograph Animals or Pets  

If you have a favorite animal (or one that you know very little about), you might want to arrange a way to see it up close and tell its story through images. You can take photos like this in a zoo or the animal’s natural habitat, depending on the type of animal you choose. Pets are another great topic for a photo essay and are among the most popular subjects for many photographers.

Show Body Positive Themes  

So much of modern photography is about showing the best looking, prettiest, or sexiest people at all times. Choosing a photo essay theme like body positivity, however, allows you to film a wide range of interesting-looking people from all walks of life.

Such a photo essay theme doesn’t just apply to women, as beauty can be found everywhere. As a photo essay photographer, it’s your job to find it!

Bring Social Issues to Life  

Some of the most impactful social photo essay examples are those where the photographer focuses on social issues. From discrimination to domestic violence to the injustices of the prison system, there are many ways that a creative photographer can highlight what’s wrong with the world. This type of photo essay can be incredibly powerful when paired with compelling subjects and some basic text.

Photograph Style and Fashion

If you live in or know of a particularly stylish locale or area, you can put together an excellent thematic photo essay by capturing impromptu shots of well-dressed people as they pass by. As with culture, style is easily identifiable and is as unifying as it is divisive. Great photo essay examples include people who’ve covered fashion sub-genres from all over the world, like urban hip hop or Japanese Visual Kei. 

Photograph Native Cultures and Traditions  

If you’ve ever opened up a copy of National Geographic, you’ve probably seen photo essay photos that fit this category. To many, the traditions, dress, religious ceremonies, and celebrations of native peoples and foreign cultures can be utterly captivating. For travel photographers, this photo essay is considered one of the best ways to tell a story with or without text.

Capture Seasonal Or Time Changes In A Landmark Photo Essay

Time-lapse photography is very compelling to most viewers. What they do in a few hours, however, others are doing over months, years, and even decades. If you know of an exciting landscape or scene, you can try to capture the same image in Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall, and put that all together into one landmark photo essay.

Alternatively, you can photograph something being lost or ravaged by time or weather. The subject of your landmark photo essay can be as simple as the wall of an old building or as complex as an old house in the woods being taken over by nature. As always, there are countless transformation-based landmark photo essay works from which you can draw inspiration.

Photograph Humanitarian Efforts or Charity  

Humanitarian efforts by groups like Habitat for Humanity, the Red Cross, and Doctors Without Borders can invoke a powerful response through even the simplest of photos. While it can be hard to put yourself in a position to get the images, there are countless photo essay examples to serve as inspiration for your photo essay project.

How to Create a Photo Essay

There is no singular way to create a photo essay. As it is, ultimately, and artistic expression of the photographer, there is no right, wrong, good, or bad. However, like all stories, some tell them well and those who do not. Luckily, as with all things, practice does make perfect. Below, we’ve listed some basic steps outlining how to create a photo essay

Steps To Create A Photo Essay

Choose Your Topic – While some photo essayists will be able to “happen upon” a photo story and turn it into something compelling, most will want to choose their photo essay topics ahead of time. While the genres listed above should provide a great starting place, it’s essential to understand that photo essay topics can cover any event or occasion and any span of time

Do Some Research – The next step to creating a photo essay is to do some basic research. Examples could include learning the history of the area you’re shooting or the background of the person you photograph. If you’re photographing a new event, consider learning the story behind it. Doing so will give you ideas on what to look for when you’re shooting.  

Make a Storyboard – Storyboards are incredibly useful tools when you’re still in the process of deciding what photo story you want to tell. By laying out your ideas shot by shot, or even doing rough illustrations of what you’re trying to capture, you can prepare your photo story before you head out to take your photos.

This process is especially important if you have little to no control over your chosen subject. People who are participating in a march or protest, for instance, aren’t going to wait for you to get in position before offering up the perfect shot. You need to know what you’re looking for and be prepared to get it.

Get the Right Images – If you have a shot list or storyboard, you’ll be well-prepared to take on your photo essay. Make sure you give yourself enough time (where applicable) and take plenty of photos, so you have a lot from which to choose. It would also be a good idea to explore the area, show up early, and stay late. You never know when an idea might strike you.

Assemble Your Story – Once you develop or organize your photos on your computer, you need to choose the pictures that tell the most compelling photo story or stories. You might also find some great images that don’t fit your photo story These can still find a place in your portfolio, however, or perhaps a completely different photo essay you create later.

Depending on the type of photographer you are, you might choose to crop or digitally edit some of your photos to enhance the emotions they invoke. Doing so is completely at your discretion, but worth considering if you feel you can improve upon the naked image.

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Best Photo Essays Tips And Tricks

Before you approach the art of photo essaying for the first time, you might want to consider with these photo essay examples some techniques, tips, and tricks that can make your session more fun and your final results more interesting. Below, we’ve compiled a list of some of the best advice we could find on the subject of photo essays. 

⬥ Experiment All You Want 

You can, and should, plan your topic and your theme with as much attention to detail as possible. That said, some of the best photo essay examples come to us from photographers that got caught up in the moment and decided to experiment in different ways. Ideas for experimentation include the following: 

Angles – Citizen Kane is still revered today for the unique, dramatic angles used in the film. Though that was a motion picture and not photography, the same basic principles still apply. Don’t be afraid to photograph some different angles to see how they bring your subject to life in different ways.

Color – Some images have more gravitas in black in white or sepia tone. You can say the same for images that use color in an engaging, dynamic way. You always have room to experiment with color, both before and after the shoot.

Contrast – Dark and light, happy and sad, rich and poor – contrast is an instantly recognizable form of tension that you can easily include in your photo essay. In some cases, you can plan for dramatic contrasts. In other cases, you simply need to keep your eyes open.

Exposure Settings – You can play with light in terms of exposure as well, setting a number of different moods in the resulting photos. Some photographers even do random double exposures to create a photo essay that’s original.

Filters – There are endless post-production options available to photographers, particularly if they use digital cameras. Using different programs and apps, you can completely alter the look and feel of your image, changing it from warm to cool or altering dozens of different settings.

Want to never run out of natural & authentic poses? You need this ⬇️ 

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If you’re using traditional film instead of a digital camera, you’re going to want to stock up. Getting the right shots for a photo essay usually involves taking hundreds of images that will end up in the rubbish bin. Taking extra pictures you won’t use is just the nature of the photography process. Luckily, there’s nothing better than coming home to realize that you managed to capture that one, perfect photograph. 

⬥ Set the Scene 

You’re not just telling a story to your audience – you’re writing it as well. If the scene you want to capture doesn’t have the look you want, don’t be afraid to move things around until it does. While this doesn’t often apply to photographing events that you have no control over, you shouldn’t be afraid to take a second to make an OK shot a great shot. 

⬥ Capture Now, Edit Later 

Editing, cropping, and digital effects can add a lot of drama and artistic flair to your photos. That said, you shouldn’t waste time on a shoot, thinking about how you can edit it later. Instead, make sure you’re capturing everything that you want and not missing out on any unique pictures. If you need to make changes later, you’ll have plenty of time! 

⬥ Make It Fun 

As photographers, we know that taking pictures is part art, part skill, and part performance. If you want to take the best photo essays, you need to loosen up and have fun. Again, you’ll want to plan for your topic as best as you can, but don’t be afraid to lose yourself in the experience. Once you let yourself relax, both the ideas and the opportunities will manifest.

⬥ It’s All in The Details 

When someone puts out a photographic essay for an audience, that work usually gets analyzed with great attention to detail. You need to apply this same level of scrutiny to the shots you choose to include in your photo essay. If something is out of place or (in the case of historical work) out of time, you can bet the audience will notice.

⬥ Consider Adding Text

While it isn’t necessary, a photographic essay can be more powerful by the addition of text. This is especially true of images with an interesting background story that can’t be conveyed through the image alone. If you don’t feel up to the task of writing content, consider partnering with another artist and allowing them tor bring your work to life.

Final Thoughts 

The world is waiting to tell us story after story. Through the best photo essays, we can capture the elements of those stories and create a photo essay that can invoke a variety of emotions in our audience.

No matter the type of cameras we choose, the techniques we embrace, or the topics we select, what really matters is that the photos say something about the people, objects, and events that make our world wonderful.

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The World Through a Lens

Helping to Reveal a Still-Shuttered World

Our weekly photo essay series offered readers a glimpse of distant places and cultures that, for a second straight year, remained largely inaccessible.

Supported by

By Stephen Hiltner and Phaedra Brown

• Dec. 27, 2021

In March 2020, as lockdowns fell into place worldwide, The Times’s Travel desk launched a new visual series to help readers cope with their confinement. We called it The World Through a Lens — and, frankly, we didn’t expect it to last this long.

But as the weeks turned into months, and the months into years, we’ve continued publishing photo essays each Monday morning, carrying you — virtually — from the islands of Maine to the synagogues of Myanmar , and nearly 100 other places in between.

We hope the series has offered you a little solace and a little distraction throughout the pandemic — and perhaps a chance to immerse yourself, if momentarily, in a distant place or culture that may have otherwise gone unnoticed.

Below are some of our favorite World Through a Lens essays from the past year. (You can browse the full archive here .)

Touring Alaska in an R.V.

For Christopher Miller, a photographer based in Juneau, Alaska, two roads — the Glenn Highway and the Richardson Highway — formed the backbone of a stunning late-spring road trip. And instead of sacrificing comfort, he traveled in style: in an R.V., the quintessentially American automobile.

“I gazed out the window at the late-spring flora, which hemmed the Matanuska River Valley, until a jolt in the road brought me back to my reality: I was hurtling down the road, lurching and swaying with the equivalent of an efficiency apartment as a back-seat passenger.” Christopher Miller

Read more about R.V. life on the Alaskan highway →

The Stunning Grandeur of Soviet-Era Metros

Between 2014 and 2020, Frank Herfort visited more than 770 Soviet-era metro stations — including stations in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia and Uzbekistan. He also visited a handful of cities whose metro systems, while not formally attributed to the Soviet Union, were either built or substantially altered during the Soviet era, including the metro stations in Bucharest, Budapest and Prague.

His goal? To create as close to a full archive of the metros as he possibly could.

“Often the project felt like a game of cat and mouse. At certain moments I felt like a criminal, despite the fact that my only intentions were to capture the stations’ beauty.” Frank Herfort

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Intimate Portraits of Mexico’s Third-Gender Muxes

On the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Mexico, the local Zapotec community has long accepted — and celebrated — a group of people known as muxes, who are born male but who adopt roles and identities associated with women.

The photographer Núria López Torres first learned about Mexico’s muxes, who are broadly considered a third gender, after working on a series of projects about gender identity in Cuba and Brazil.

“My first visit to Juchitán, in 2014, coincided with a series of festivities, during which seemingly everyone I encountered — young, old, men, women, muxes — danced, ate and drank in celebration. The days were long and intense, full of joy and euphoria.” Núria López Torres

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A Cyclist on the English Landscape

In 2020, Roff Smith, a travel photographer grounded by the pandemic, began to bring a camera and tripod with him on his morning bicycle rides, shooting them as though they were magazine assignments.

What began as simply something to do — a challenge to try to see his familiar surroundings through fresh eyes — soon blossomed into a celebration of traveling close to home.

“You don’t need to board a plane and jet off to the far side of the world to experience a sense of travel or the romance of difference. It lies waiting on your doorstep — if you look.” Roff Smith

Read more about Roff’s adventures in southeast England →

A Stunning Look at the Hidden Mysteries of Glacier Caves

For more than 15 years, the geologist and photographer Jason Gulley has explored and mapped glacier caves from Nepal to Greenland, venturing into vast, icy labyrinths to study their relationships with glacial melting and climate change.

Among his findings: Rising temperatures are forming caves inside glaciers in the Everest region of Nepal that are rotting the glaciers from the inside out.

“As my eyes adjusted to the lower light, I found myself staring down into a chasm that was far bigger than anything I thought we might find beneath the surface of the Greenland ice sheet.” Jason Gulley

Read more about glacier caves in Alaska, Greenland, Nepal and Svalbard →

Living on the Margins, ‘Surfing’ on the Buses

In the Brazilian city of Olinda, a group of thrill seekers took up an illegal and death-defying hobby: riding on the outside of public buses.

The photographer Victor Moriyama first learned of the pastime via a video posted to Facebook. Within an hour, he was exchanging messages with the surfers and planning his trip to Olinda.

“During my weeklong visit with the bus surfers in 2017, I felt happy and free. In a way, they allowed me to revisit my own roots: During my teenage years, growing up in São Paulo, I, too, engaged in certain risky and transgressive behavior.” Victor Moriyama

Read more about Brazilian bus surfers →

Exploring Greece’s Unseen Corners

After a chance encounter in Olympos piqued his interest in traditional Greek clothing, the photographer George Tatakis decided to make a project of exploring the unseen corners of his country — to meet the people, learn about their traditional practices and make images along the way.

“To me, photography is about much more than just the images themselves. I have a passion for rural Greece, and I enjoy exploring the concept of xenia, or hospitality — a central virtue that can be traced back to ancient Greece.” George Tatakis

Read more about Greece’s vibrant traditional culture →

Agony and Ecstasy on the Scottish Archipelago of St. Kilda

For centuries, the archipelago of St. Kilda, one of the most remote and unforgiving outposts in the British Isles, has electrified the imaginations of writers, historians, artists, scientists and adventurers. Its tantalizing history is replete with a rich cultural heritage, distinctive architecture and haunting isolation — not to mention disease, famine and exile.

When Stephen Hiltner, an editor on the Travel desk, visited the archipelago with his brother and sister, the 85-mile boat ride through rough seas left some passengers huddling in discomfort. But the windswept scenery was otherworldly.

“St. Kilda’s natural features are almost comical in their splendor. Jagged sea stacks rise like bundled knives from the opaque water; clamoring seabirds float nonchalantly above precipitous cliffs; swooping fields blanket an otherworldly landscape utterly devoid of trees.” Stephen Hiltner

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In Los Angeles, Glimpses of an Oasis With Deep Immigrant Roots

Emerging like a mirage from their surroundings, the San Pedro Community Gardens have for decades provided physical and spiritual nourishment to multiple generations of immigrant Angelenos.

When the photographer Stella Kalinina discovered the gardens in 2019, she instantly connected with the expressions of longing for ancestral lands.

“As a Russian-Ukrainian American who moved to the United States as a teenager and later married a second-generation Mexican American, I find myself drawn to stories of migration, severed connections, longing for one’s culture and the making of new homes.” Stella Kalinina

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A Personal Pilgrimage to a Downed Warplane in Papua New Guinea

In 1986, when he was 12 years old, Joel Carillet — whose family had moved to Papua New Guinea to work with a Bible-translation organization — visited the site of a World War II plane that crashed in the jungle near the village of Likan.

His return, some 33 years later, prompted a series of reflections on the various ways that the site — and his experiences in Papua New Guinea as a child — shaped him, then and now.

“As the plane lined up for landing on the grass airstrip, I felt a deep joy — the sort you feel when, after a quarter century of wandering, you are returning to a central place in your life.” Joel Carillet

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Portraits of Kolkata’s Rickshaw Pullers

The dense metropolis of Kolkata is among the only places in India — and one of the few left in the world — where fleets of hand-pulled rickshaws still ply the streets. The men who operate them are called rickshaw wallahs; some pull their rickshaws more than 10 miles a day while carrying several hundred pounds.

The photographer Emilienne Malfatto documented the men and their work while on a scholarship for a photography workshop.

“Rickshaw wallahs don’t earn a living serving tourists. Their clientele consists mainly of local Kolkatans: shoppers coming to and from markets, or residents transiting the city’s narrow side streets.” Emilienne Malfatto

Read more about Kolkata’s rickshaw wallahs →

The Searing Beauty, and Harsh Reality, of a Kentucky Tobacco Harvest

Driven by his interest in the cultures and traditions of his home state of Kentucky, Luke Sharrett photographed his first tobacco harvest eight years ago. Each year since then, he has eagerly returned.

At Tucker Farms in Shelby County, 25 men from Nicaragua and one from Mexico perform the grueling seasonal work that Americans largely avoid. The labor is physical, repetitive and exhausting. Long days are punctuated by a few short breaks and a lunch of home-cooked beans and rice.

“Documenting the tobacco harvests is a highlight of working as a photographer in Kentucky. Reuniting each year with the crew is a joy. I marvel at their skill, ingenuity and efficiency.” Luke Sharrett

Read more about the seasonal tobacco workers in Shelby County →

On Horseback Among the Eagle Hunters and Herders of the Mongolian Altai

Deep in the Altai Mountains, where Russia, China, Kazakhstan and Mongolia meet, Kazakh people have for centuries developed and nurtured a special bond with golden eagles.

In October 2019, after living and working in northern Iraq for almost three years, the photographer Claire Thomas began working on a personal photography project that drew on her background and affinity with horses.

To start, she flew to western Mongolia to meet and photograph the iconic Kazakh hunters, horsemen and animal herders.

“Outwardly, documenting the traditional ways of life in western Mongolia stands in stark contrast to my time spent photographing scenes of conflict and suffering in Iraq. But the two subjects share a common theme: the human struggle not just to survive, but to build a better future for oneself and one’s family.” Claire Thomas

Read more about Kazakh eagle hunter in western Mongolia →

Glimpses of Sudan’s Forgotten Pyramids

Throughout the 30-year dictatorship of Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who led Sudan through a long series of wars and famines, the pyramids of Meroe saw few international visitors and remained relatively unknown.

But after the revolution that led to Mr. al-Bashir’s ouster in 2019 and the removal of Sudan from the United States’ list of state sponsors of terrorism, the country’s archaeological sites were finally poised to receive broader attention and protections.

In early 2020, the photographer Alessio Mamo traveled to Sudan to visit the ancient city of Meroe, whose pyramids were built between 2,700 and 2,300 years ago.

“The Meroe pyramids — around 200 in total, many of them in ruins — seemed to be in perfect harmony with the surrounding landscape, as if the wind had smoothed their edges to accommodate them among the dunes.” Alessio Mamo

Read more about Sudan’s archaeological treasures →

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Photo Essay: Documenting my Culture in its Truest Form

About the author, wayne quilliam.

"Being one of the very few professional Indigenous photographers in Australia, I find it my responsibility to record and document my culture in its truest form. My social documentary work focuses on health and education, as I believe that if our communities have the necessary levels of health care, only then are we able to concentrate on developing the appropriate educational skills that will allow us to be who we are. Aboriginal Australia is a progressive modern community that continues its link with the Earth and traditional practices whilst evolving and adapting to twenty-first century culture." -- Wayne Quilliam Wayne Quilliam is recipient of Australia's 
2009 National Indigenous Artist of the Year, awarded in recognition of his continuous service to indigenous people throughout the world. He won the 2008 Human Rights Media Award for his work on the "Apology" and was twice a finalist in the prestigious Walkley Awards for a social documentary on the Redfern Riots. In harmony with his photojournalistic work he is recognised as one of Australia's top 100 artists for his "Lowanna" art that infuses textures of earth over bodies. It is estimated that his photo documentary exhibitions on the "Apology" and "Sorry, More than a Word" at Australia's Parliament House were viewed by more than a quarter of a million people. Mr. Quilliam works with indigenous groups in Mexico, Bolivia, Viet Nam, Cambodia and Guam, and is currently developing an intercultural exchange between indigenous photographers around the world.

The UN Chronicle is grateful to Mr. Quilliam for his permission to freely reproduce these images in its pages and online.

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Cultural Identity Essay

27 August, 2020

12 minutes read

Author:  Elizabeth Brown

No matter where you study, composing essays of any type and complexity is a critical component in any studying program. Most likely, you have already been assigned the task to write a cultural identity essay, which is an essay that has to do a lot with your personality and cultural background. In essence, writing a cultural identity essay is fundamental for providing the reader with an understanding of who you are and which outlook you have. This may include the topics of religion, traditions, ethnicity, race, and so on. So, what shall you do to compose a winning cultural identity essay?

Cultural Identity Paper: Definitions, Goals & Topics 

Before starting off with a cultural identity essay, it is fundamental to uncover what is particular about this type of paper. First and foremost, it will be rather logical to begin with giving a general and straightforward definition of a cultural identity essay. In essence, cultural identity essay implies outlining the role of the culture in defining your outlook, shaping your personality, points of view regarding a multitude of matters, and forming your qualities and beliefs. Given a simpler definition, a cultural identity essay requires you to write about how culture has influenced your personality and yourself in general. So in this kind of essay you as a narrator need to give an understanding of who you are, which strengths you have, and what your solid life position is.

Yet, the goal of a cultural identity essay is not strictly limited to describing who you are and merely outlining your biography. Instead, this type of essay pursues specific objectives, achieving which is a perfect indicator of how high-quality your essay is. Initially, the primary goal implies outlining your cultural focus and why it makes you peculiar. For instance, if you are a french adolescent living in Canada, you may describe what is so special about it: traditions of the community, beliefs, opinions, approaches. Basically, you may talk about the principles of the society as well as its beliefs that made you become the person you are today.

So far, cultural identity is a rather broad topic, so you will likely have a multitude of fascinating ideas for your paper. For instance, some of the most attention-grabbing topics for a personal cultural identity essay are:

• Memorable traditions of your community
• A cultural event that has influenced your personality 
• Influential people in your community
• Locations and places that tell a lot about your culture and identity

Cultural Identity Essay Structure

As you might have already guessed, composing an essay on cultural identity might turn out to be fascinating but somewhat challenging. Even though the spectrum of topics is rather broad, the question of how to create the most appropriate and appealing structure remains open.

Like any other kind of an academic essay, a cultural identity essay must compose of three parts: introduction, body, and concluding remarks. Let’s take a more detailed look at each of the components:

Introduction 

Starting to write an essay is most likely one of the most time-consuming and mind-challenging procedures. Therefore, you can postpone writing your introduction and approach it right after you finish body paragraphs. Nevertheless, you should think of a suitable topic as well as come up with an explicit thesis. At the beginning of the introduction section, give some hints regarding the matter you are going to discuss. You have to mention your thesis statement after you have briefly guided the reader through the topic. You can also think of indicating some vital information about yourself, which is, of course, relevant to the topic you selected.

Your main body should reveal your ideas and arguments. Most likely, it will consist of 3-5 paragraphs that are more or less equal in size. What you have to keep in mind to compose a sound ‘my cultural identity essay’ is the argumentation. In particular, always remember to reveal an argument and back it up with evidence in each body paragraph. And, of course, try to stick to the topic and make sure that you answer the overall question that you stated in your topic. Besides, always keep your thesis statement in mind: make sure that none of its components is left without your attention and argumentation.

Conclusion 

Finally, after you are all finished with body paragraphs and introduction, briefly summarize all the points in your final remarks section. Paraphrase what you have already revealed in the main body, and make sure you logically lead the reader to the overall argument. Indicate your cultural identity once again and draw a bottom line regarding how your culture has influenced your personality.

Best Tips For Writing Cultural Identity Essay

Writing a ‘cultural identity essay about myself’ might be somewhat challenging at first. However, you will no longer struggle if you take a couple of plain tips into consideration. Following the tips below will give you some sound and reasonable cultural identity essay ideas as well as make the writing process much more pleasant:

• Start off by creating an outline. The reason why most students struggle with creating a cultural identity essay lies behind a weak structure. The best way to organize your ideas and let them flow logically is to come up with a helpful outline. Having a reference to build on is incredibly useful, and it allows your essay to look polished.
• Remember to write about yourself. The task of a cultural identity essay implies not focusing on your culture per se, but to talk about how it shaped your personality. So, switch your focus to describing who you are and what your attitudes and positions are. 
• Think of the most fundamental cultural aspects. Needless to say, you first need to come up with a couple of ideas to be based upon in your paper. So, brainstorm all the possible ideas and try to decide which of them deserve the most attention. In essence, try to determine which of the aspects affected your personality the most.
• Edit and proofread before submitting your paper. Of course, the content and the coherence of your essay’s structure play a crucial role. But the grammatical correctness matters a lot too. Even if you are a native speaker, you may still make accidental errors in the text. To avoid the situation when unintentional mistakes spoil the impression from your essay, always double check your cultural identity essay. 

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Lhasa in the Cultural Revolution: A Photo Essay 18 min read

Tsering woeser presents her father’s photographs of tibetan struggle sessions, in her new book forbidden memory: tibet during the cultural revolution , the tibetan essayist and poet tsering woeser dissects the impact of china’s cultural revolution on lhasa, her birthplace, five decades ago. this photo essay features 18 of the more than 300 photos in the book, accompanied by woeser’s comments (translated by susan chen); these are based on her interviews with tibetans and chinese in lhasa who lived through the events shown in the photos. all of the photos were taken by woeser’s father, tsering dorje (1937-91), who was a pla officer and photographer serving in lhasa in the early 1960s. his photos, which came to light only after his death, are the only known visual records of the struggle sessions, humiliation parades, and mass rallies staged during the cultural revolution in tibet. for our previously published interview with tsering woeser about her book and her father’s photographs, please read here . – robbie barnett.

Female Red Guard Tibetan Red Guards with their armbands, lined up in the Sungchöra, the teaching courtyard beside the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa, just before or just after going into the temple to smash up much of its contents. They are holding their red-tasseled spears, an insignia of the Red Guards. The one in the foreground was from a wealthy trading family and normally would not have been able to join the Red Guards, but an exception seems to have been made in her case. She is said to have later become a devout Buddhist practitioner after the Cultural Revolution. (Tsering Dorje, Lhasa, 1966.)

Texts thrown into fire Activists in Lhasa burn religious texts that have been taken from Buddhist volumes in homes and temples. The fires have been set in the Sungchöra, the former teaching courtyard outside the Jokhang temple, the most famous shrine in the Tibetan Buddhist world. (Tsering Dorje, Lhasa, 1966.)

Struggle parade with Ribur Rinpoche Targets of struggle sessions are paraded along an alley leading from the Tsemonling temple to the Ramoche temple in Lhasa, on their way to or from a struggle session. The man with the crudely painted face was a famous lama from Sera Monastery, Ribur Rinpoche, who was the struggle target in some thirty-five struggle sessions. On this occasion his face has been daubed with paint to make him look like a villain and he has been made to carry a small Buddhist shrine in his hands, with a set of ritual cymbals draped around his neck. His given name, “Ngawang Gyatso,” and the words “ox-demon-snake-spirit” are legible on the tall hat he has been made to wear as a sign of criminality. He was released from prison in 1976 and was able to get to India eleven years later, after which he spent the rest of his life teaching Buddhism outside Tibet. (Tsering Dorje, Lhasa, 1966.)

Phunkhang as struggle target A former aristocrat-official, Phunkhang Tsering Dondrub, is paraded through the streets of Lhasa. A moustache has been painted on his face and he has been made to wear the single long earring in the left ear that was a mark of noble rank in the traditional Tibetan system. His father had been a kalon or minister in the four-person cabinet of the government of the Dalai Lama in the 1940s, and his older brother was a son-in-law of the king of Sikkim. He had held only a mid-level position in the Tibetan government when it was disbanded in 1959, seven years before this photograph was taken. He has been made to carry a case of  knives and forks, probably with ivory handles, either to show that he was a member of the exploiting class or that he was attracted to foreign or Western lifestyles. After the Cultural Revolution was over, he was rehabilitated and given token positions in the Chinese system until his death in 1990. His house is now a Chinese-owned hotel. (Tsering Dorje, Lhasa, 1966/67.)

Crowd accusing Samding Dorje Phagmo in the courtyard of her house The woman whose head is lowered with her torso bent over is Samding Dorje Phagmo, the best known of all female reincarnate lamas in Tibet. A crowd of accusers has been taken to the courtyard of her house in Lhasa to conduct a struggle session against her. From what can be seen, the banner behind her says “must carry out the great Cultural Revolution in Tibet.” She was twenty-four years old then and had given birth to her third child less than two months earlier. Before ending up in the situation recorded here, she had been hailed across China as a “patriot.” This is because in late 1959, just six months after following the Dalai Lama into exile in India, she had chosen to return to Tibet and had been a guest of honor at the celebrations in Beijing that October for the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic – where she had been received by Mao himself. After the death of Mao in 1976, she was again given honorary positions in the government, and appeared in public praising the Party’s policies, a role known in Tibetan as “performing as a political flower-vase.” (Tsering Dorje, Lhasa, August 1966.)

Samding Dorje Phagmo with fists Samding Dorje Phagmo, the same female reincarnated lama from the previous photo, is struggled against in the courtyard of her home in Lhasa, together with her mother and father. Her father, Rigdzin Gyalpo, a former steward to a noble family, had not joined the Lhasa uprising against China in 1959 and had been recognized by the Chinese as an “outstanding patriot.” However, he was still a target in the Cultural Revolution. For years he was regularly beaten because of a rumour he had once said something while drunk about Chairman Mao needing to eat shit. He was punched so severely that his shoulders were fractured. He came to regret his “patriotic” deeds in the past and died in 1977 or 1978. As for Dorje Phagmo’s mother, she was very timid. Other than quietly attending the daily reform-through-labor session, she did not dare to say anything. (Tsering Dorje, Lhasa, 1966/67.)

Struggle session in the courtyard of Samding Dorje Phagmo A young man with a cap and wearing a watch reaches for the ga’u or amulet box that has been placed on the bumpa or ornamental vase that Samding Dorje Phagmo has been made to hold during a struggle session outside her home in Lhasa. The young man later became the commander of the Peasants and Nomads Headquarters, one of the radical factions that engaged in street fighting during the Cultural Revolution in Lhasa. Thirty years later, he was running a mahjong business. The woman next to him was a shoemaker in the cooperative and also an activist, but the older woman behind, holding a small flag in her hand, was known to be very mild in character and so had probably been ordered by the Neighborhood Committee to be there. (Tsering Dorje, Lhasa, August 1966.)

Kashö presented to the crowd Two young activists hold down Kashö Chögyal Nyima, who had been a cabinet minister in the former Tibetan government, during a struggle session in Lhasa. He was popularly seen as a collaborator with the Chinese regime, but he was still made a target in the Cultural Revolution.  The words on the tall hat read “Kashöpa, an ox-demon-snake-spirit, a power-seizing bad person, to be completely destroyed.” He is dressed in official silks with jewelry usually worn by Tibetan noblewomen draped round his neck, and he has been made to carry a big wad of Tibetan paper currency, together with a damaru , a two-sided drum used in religious rituals. He was subjected to continuous struggle sessions over fourteen successive evenings, between each of which he had to do hard labor in the fields during the day. Throughout these he was forced to keep his head down and his torso bent. After the Cultural Revolution, he was used again by the CCP as a token Tibetan dignitary until he died in 1986 at the age of eighty-three. (Tsering Dorje, Lhasa, 1966.)

Struggle session against Tsadi Tsedan Dorje A well-known Tibetan activist named Tsamchö or “Lugu Aja” (Elder Sister from Lugu) denounces Tsadi Tseten Dorje, the former mayor of Lhasa, during a struggle session in Lhasa. Tsamchö had been a beggar before 1959. After the Cultural Revolution she ran a small business, and is said to have become a religious devotee. The big-character poster hung from Tsadi’s neck lists his crimes: “Counter-revolutionary Tseten Dorje, deceptive ringleader and promoter of turmoil, butcher, murderer and slaughterer of the working masses.” Behind Lugu Aja’s head is a vertical signboard in Chinese and Tibetan, on which one can just make out the words “the great Chinese Communist Party.” This struggle session is taking place in the Sungchöra, the former teaching courtyard of the Jokhang Temple, the foremost shrine in the Tibetan Buddhist world. Written in Chinese on the board just below the eaves of the temple wall is the new Chinese name for the courtyard: Lixin guangchang , the “Establish-the-New Square.” (Tsering Dorje, Lhasa,1966.)

Struggle session against Sampo Sampo Tsewang Rigdzin, the former commander in chief of the Tibetan army before the PLA invaded in 1950, is paraded in public during a struggle session in Lhasa. After 1950, he had been given a token position in the PLA as a major general, and in 1959 he was nearly killed when a crowd of Tibetans tried to stone him, accusing him of collaboration. He was then promoted to an even higher, but nominal, position in the new Chinese system, that of deputy director of the Tibet Military Control Commission. But in August 1966 Sampo was singled out as an “ox-demon-snake-spirit,” and accused of “organizing rebellion, aiding foreign powers, and opposing the Party and the dictatorship of the proletariat.” He and his wife were repeatedly struggled against and all their property was confiscated. In 1973, deeply depressed, he died. His wife passed away not long after. The photograph shows him wearing khalkhasug , the richly embroidered brocade robes in Mongolian style worn by lay officials of the fourth rank or above in the traditional Tibetan governmental system. The hat he has been forced to wear, known as a chagda , with its gold braid and precious stones, is summer wear: it is not part of the traditional khalkhasug set. The single long earring or sogchil is also a symbol of his status, and the long-necked tassel or domdom hanging down from his chest was used for horses ridden by officials of the fourth rank or above. The activist on the left, known as “One Eyed” Thubten, became an official in the Barkor Neighborhood Committee after 1987. (Tsering Dorje, Lhasa, 1966.)

Struggle session against Nyarongshag family A struggle session in an alleyway near Tengyeling monastery in Lhasa against three traditional Tibetan doctors. The oldest of the three, Tsojé Rigdzin Lhundrub Paljor, known as Dr. Nyarongshag, had also founded the largest lay school in Tibet before the Chinese take-over. The young woman who is lending her arm to the old man is Dr. Nyarongshag’s third daughter, Tsephel; also a doctor. She had given birth to her daughter just three or four days earlier. The man on the left of Dr. Nyarongshag was his second son, Kungyur. Decades later he was able to flee to India where he served as the personal doctor to the Dalai Lama in exile. The struggle targets here have had small but heavy medicine pouches called menku hung around their necks. The stacks of Indian banknotes hung from the neck of the old man were fees that he had been paid when he had practiced medicine in India. On this occasion the three doctors were paraded through the streets and forced to smash a prayer-wheel shrine. The old man was severely beaten in the struggle sessions and remained more or less bedridden (but still treating patients) until he passed away in 1979 at the age of eighty-two. Among those shouting slogans in the crowd, the man in the lower right-hand corner, wearing glasses and a cap, is Lobsang, the deputy head of the Barkor Neighborhood Committee, a former tailor who became a local official after the Cultural Revolution. Just behind the crowd taking part in the struggle session two PLA soldiers are walking past. (Tsering Dorje, Lhasa, 1966.)

Woman being struggled against A Tibetan woman named Shatraba Dechö is presented to the crowd during a struggle session in Lhasa. She is wearing a traditional patrug headdress, heavy jewelry has been draped around her neck, and a big-character poster has been attached to her, listing the counts against her: she is accused of “spreading rumors” and “of claiming to be an activist while concealing items belonging to counterrevolutionaries.” Her fourth crime is that “she has sold silver, gold, and other valuables to foreigners.” The Tibetan writing on the tall hat she has been made to wear says “ox-demon snake-spirit Dechö.” Of the two women with their hands on her neck, the one on the right is Penchung, an activist from the Barkor Neighborhood Committee who was reputed to be particularly vicious. The one on the left was a student at Lhasa Middle School who later became a tailor. (Tsering Dorje, Lhasa, 1966/67.)

Public humiliation of a village oracle An unknown village woman is paraded in a struggle session in a rural area outside Lhasa. She is holding a two-sided drum or damaru in one hand and in the other a portable shrine in which tsatsa or clay figures of the protectress Palden Lhamo and the gonpo , or protector deity. She was probably an oracle who would go into trances when requested to perform divinations and so had been branded as a “swindler” or “vampire” by Cultural Revolution activists. (Tsering Dorje, Lhasa, 1966/67.)

Boy with his fist raised A boy holding a scrap of paper and shouting slogans at a rally or struggle session in the teaching courtyard of the Jokhang temple in Lhasa. He apparently was later made a leader in the local militia. After the Cultural Revolution, when he was in his fifties, he is said to have become a religious practitioner. The man visible sitting just behind the boy’s left shoulder, wearing what looks like a sun hat or topee , is Pomda Topgyal, a member of a leading business family, who himself would soon be taken away to be struggled against after this photo was taken. (Tsering Dorje, Lhasa, 1966/67.)

Smiling “Chinese boss” in a struggle session A smiling man, who from his appearance seems to be Han Chinese, and probably a cadre, directs a struggle session against a Tibetan lama in Lhasa. The Tibetan Red Guard whose hand is on the left shoulder of the lama appears to be sticking out his tongue, the traditional gesture of extreme respect, and in another photograph is slightly bent over, suggesting that he might be feeling uncomfortable about abusing the lama. A number of people who appear to be cadres or soldiers are standing on the steps looking down at the spectacle. As for the lama, we can tell from the writing on the hat only that one part of his name was Gyatso. A stack of pages from sacred texts has been tied to his shoulders and the cart is full of Buddhist scroll paintings and other ritual objects, now known as “Four Olds” that have to be destroyed, which the lama would have had to push through the streets. (Tsering Dorje, Lhasa, 1966/67.)

Slogan reciter at rally A representative of the “emancipated serfs” is taking the lead to call out slogans at a rally for the crowd to repeat. He has a piece of paper in one hand, probably with the slogans, and in the other hand he is holding up a bouquet of flowers made out of colored crepe paper and tied onto a stick. Paper flowers were common accessories used at Cultural Revolution events and can be seen in many of the photographs of rallies in this period. The pen clipped inside the breast pocket of his white shirt, worn as a jacket, was a widely envied status symbol at that time and indicated that this man was probably a cadre. (Tsering Dorje, Lhasa, 1966/67.)

Women march past leaders at rally Tibetan Women march past the new Chinese leaders of Tibet after a rally in Lhasa on October 1, 1966, held with fifty thousand people to mark the seventeenth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The marchers carry pictures of Mao, placards with quotations from Mao, and Chinese national flags.  On the panel to the left is written, “Study Chairman Mao’s writings, obey what Chairman Mao says, behave according to Chairman Mao’s instructions, be good warriors of Chairman Mao.” The panel on the right says, “Study the Sixteen Instructions; familiarize yourself with the Sixteen Instructions; grasp the Sixteen Instructions; implement the Sixteen Instructions,” a reference to a decision by the Party’s Central Committee on August 8, 1966 which called for struggle against “people in authority who are taking the capitalist road,” repudiation of “the reactionary bourgeois academic ‘authorities,’” and the transformation of education, literature, and art. (Tsering Dorje, Lhasa, 1966.)

Untitled A senior Han Chinese military leader hands out portraits of Chairman Mao to a line of waiting Tibetan “emancipated serfs.” (Tsering Dorje, Tibet, 1967.)

Tsering Woeser, Forbidden Memory: Tibet During the Chinese Revolution , trans. Susan Chen, ed. Robert Barnett (Potomac Books, April 2020)

Header: crowd accusing samding dorje phagmo in the courtyard of her house in lhasa, 1966 (tsering dorje, courtesy of tsering woeser).

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Published by Tsering Woeser

Tsering Woeser, born in Lhasa in 1966, is a Tibetan poet and essayist and the most prominent commentator on the Tibet issue still living within China. She has written twenty-one books in Chinese, with eighteen translations of her work published in nine other languages, including Voices from Tibet (Hong Kong University, 2014), Tibet on Fire (Verso, 2016), and two others in English, as well as translations of her selected online articles at High Peaks, Pure Earth . Woeser has received the Prince Claus Award from the Netherlands and the U.S. Department of State’s International Women of Courage Award. She lives under close surveillance in Beijing. View all posts by Tsering Woeser

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Editors’ Forum Writing with Light

Corpus: Mining the Border

By Daniel Hoffman

November 12, 2012

Cite As: Hoffman, Daniel. 2014. "Corpus: Mining the Border." Photo Essays, Cultural Anthropology website, January 31. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/corpus-mining-the-border

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Editors’ Introduction

In 2010, a conversation was ignited over incorporating photo essays into the new Cultural Anthropology website. The conversation, which started about a photo essay project, quickly transformed into a discussion about disciplinary boundaries, peer review, and new directions in anthropology. With the understanding that so many anthropologists are engaged in alternative forms of critical ethnographic expression and thought came the realization that it was time for renewed discussion about content and aesthetics as well as procedure and review.

It is with great pleasure, then, that we introduce our first photo essay, by Daniel Hoffman. In this inaugural essay our goal was to present an aesthetically and intellectually powerful piece of work and to spur provocative conversation. Our goal was to facilitate a conversation about the medium and the message; to do so, we felt we needed to press the boundaries and ask our contributor and reviewers to reset the stage of peer review. They all graciously agreed to do so. The result is that we have a stunning essay presented with “open” peer reviews.

By choosing an open peer review process we mean to perform a critical engagement with the photos, while also instigating a discussion between author and reviewers, as well as author, reviewers, and audience. This would produce a different reviewing and viewing process while facilitating new conversations about ethnography and representation. It would also be to further ask: What is the intent of peer review? And what can we do differently with this process (and this medium)? Our two reviewers, Zeynep Gürsel and Alan Klima, generously agreed to have their comments made public in service of starting the dialogue.

We believe this first photo essay sets a high bar for the potentialities of visual anthropology. Our hope is that it will lead to further discussions: on photography, the role of art and media in anthropology, and also the process and practice of peer review for these representative modes of ethnographic work. It is meant to be an invitation and a provocation. While future photo essays will not necessarily engage in an open peer review process, we hope to continue a dialogue about the practice of visual anthropology and what counts as scholarly practice.

Michelle Stewart and Vivian Choi

Download “ Corpus: Mining the Border ” by Daniel Hoffman as a pdf booklet.

Photo Essay

So I resolved to start my inquiry with no more than a few photographs . . . Nothing to do with a corpus: just some bodies. –Roland Barthes

The sounds on the mines around Mayengema are scratchy, percussive sounds. Sounds of scraping, shaking and digging. These are sounds of destruction. Over them float the voices of miners and bosses. Male voices, sometimes singing, but more often bantering, arguing, or cursing. The diamonds they search for make no sounds that distinguish them from the gravel, mud, and water of the mine.

The Mayengema mines seem somehow to exist in a low visual register as well. The mud of the rainforest floor and the dense vegetation that surround the pits are monochrome yellows and greens. The tools of alluvial or surface mining are spare and symmetrical: hand shovels, troughs and screens. Gravel from the bottom of the pits is maddeningly uniform. The bodies of the miners are stripped to their essence by hard repetitive work and the hard repetitive landscape.

The village of Mayengema lies on the Moro River near the Sierra Leone–Liberia border. It is some fifteen miles from the nearest road, which is itself only passable in the dry season and then only by motorbike. The cataracts on the Moro River make it impassable by boat, so what comes and goes from Mayengema comes and goes by foot.

In the past two years thousands of young men have made the trip to Mayengema and to other small settlements throughout the Gola Forest. The more established and accessible diamond fields to the north and west have become crowded and dangerous. The rapaciousness with which they were mined during Sierra Leone’s war has convinced many that the fields are virtually tapped out. Too many authorities claim ownership over the sites, and there is close scrutiny of who goes in and what comes out. These Gola Forest deposits, by contrast, are harder to access and thus potentially more rewarding. They hold the promise of virgin territory and less competition for young men willing or desperate enough to leave everything else behind.

Much of the mining workforce in the forest pits is made up of ex-combatants from fighting factions on both sides of the border. Fighters I knew from Sierra Leone’s Civil Defense Force and from Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy followed the rumors of rich new diamond deposits ever deeper into the forest. Along with their former adversaries from the Sierra Leone army, the Revolutionary United Front and the National Patriotic Front of Liberia they moved in small groups of two to a dozen. Often these same units fought together during the war; then as now they blur the distinction between a labor crew and a militia squad. For two decades and more many of these men have cycled through the region’s urban and rural battle zones, political campaigns, and gold and diamond mines. They follow rumors of work or are sent on the orders of patrons with the authority to control their labor. They transit networks of friends and contacts and rarely remain situated long. They arrive and depart as strangers.

In early 2010 I visited Mayengema and other borderland mining sites as part of an ongoing ethnography of the mobilization and militancy of young men’s labor in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Much of my research charts the ways in which this particular West African warscape is organized around the efficient assembly and deployment of young men and their physical capacities, especially their capacity for violence (see Hoffman 2007a, 2011a, 2011b). It is a political economy that has reshaped the meanings of patrimonialism and military command, and reshaped the meanings of youth and male sociality. It is a political economy that refigures the very spaces of the city and the occult imaginary. What has been striking is the interchangeability of spheres of work, the qualitative similarity for many young men between the tasks and rewards of war fighting and the tasks and rewards of mining, campaigning, or tapping rubber. Having elsewhere explored the macro processes that made these young men available to forces larger than themselves, I came to Mayengema and the Gola Forest to chart these processes at the level of the material bodies of young men. The resulting photo essay is an ethnographic portrait of the shape and texture of work.

Labors of the Body

Work on the mines is sisyphean. Diamonds are carried across this landscape by century after century of moving water and shifting earth. One accesses them by panning creeks and river floors or by scrapping away the topsoil. The first step, then, is to alter the earth: divert the course of waterways if possible, or peel back two, ten or twenty feet of the forest floor. This is deconstructive labor measured by the shovelful. Mining plots are made by transforming the forest into a clear-cut moonscape, pit after pit separated by towering piles of discarded earth, sand and stone, all dug by hand.

The exposed sand and gravel must then be washed and sifted. The pits are flooded. Hand held screens allow the miners to pass dirt and water through, trapping larger objects at the top. Next the centripetal forces of rapid rotation separate generic stones from the heavier diamonds. The miners stand in the flooded pits or flowing waterways and they bend and sift for hours while a comrade loads shovel after shovel of sand and gravel. The miner shakes his screen, running his hands through the top course of stone left on the sifter and tossing the lighter, worthless stones back into the pit. Once a volume of heavier stone has settled on the bottom of the sifter, he and the rest of the crew will gather. Together they carefully pick through the small pile, looking for oddly shaped and colored bits of wealth amid the debris.

The work is always hot and always hard. As the number of pits grows and the forest canopy disappears the miners place palm fronds around the pit to make shade. In the dry season the bodies of the workers are parched from the waist up, water logged from the waist down, but the work goes quickly. In the long wet season everything is soaked and much of what the miners’ shovels pull out the rainwater immediately puts back in.

When the small pile does unearth stones of value, these stones begin to traverse a complex and varied web of relations. Much depends on the arrangements that brought the miners here and on the personalities and predilections of everyone involved. Typically, the crew has a boss. He might be slightly older than the other miners, perhaps once a low-level commander at the battlefront or a team captain on the campaign trail. In some cases he is entirely beholden to a patron, a more powerful figure who pays for the crews’ equipment and transport to the mines and who provides them with a single, simple meal a day. In some cases the crew boss himself acts as patron, though the fact that he is here in the muddy pits means he is not wealthy enough to deploy the labors of others.

Through the boss the crew is bound to other links in this chain. These include the landowner holding title over the plot, the local representative of the Ministry of Mines, the holder of the mining permit, who may or may not be the landowner and may or may not be the patron and may or may not be the crew boss. Every one of these is a stakeholder in the operation and ultimately in the small pile of stone. Depending on their level of trust in one another and the quality of the gem, they might all go together to a makeshift diamond purchase office in the village or town closest to the mine. They might travel collectively to Zimmi or Kenema, towns with multiple buyers and higher prices. If the level of trust is high or the crew is inexperienced or can’t afford the trip to town, the boss might simply sell the stone to his patron for a fraction of its value. Periodically a miner or an entire crew will slip away in the night, leaving everyone to suspect that something of real value was pulled from the ground and the diamond is headed for Freetown or Monrovia, the miners having made the calculus of risk and reward and decided in favor of flight.

Many of the thousands of miners who have moved into this forest live at the pits in makeshift camps. They supplement the meager provisions of their patrons with what they can glean from the forest or barter from nearby villages. Others pack tight in the small huts of forest communities, paying a minimal rent that is often transacted in labor rather than cash. There are larger towns at the edge of the forest, towns like Mano River Kongo on the Liberia side that are close enough to the forest pits that the men travel there and back daily, though this means long treks on difficult forest paths. These towns are swollen with men. For Mano River Kongo it is not the first time. This was once a major site for the excavation of iron ore, until a mudslide in the early 1980s destroyed much of the settlement. The American ore company quickly departed, leaving what remained of Mano River Kongo to wither and die. Now, six months after a major diamond find just outside town, the population of Mano River Kongo is equal to what it once was, but it is hardly a thriving community. There is a notable lack of children or old men, and very few women of any age. It is a town of male youth, and they squat in the ruins of the school, in tents pitched between old houses, in a half built mosque. For entertainment they play soccer, smoke, and drink tea. All of this takes place in the shadow of the ore bearing mountains, terraced into strange and unstable ziggurat forms during the last mineral rush on the region.

Fields of Vision

For all its risks and scant rewards, the work of mining the border and the landscape it produces are strangely beautiful. The collaborative rhythm of grinding grains with mortar and pestle has long been described as the heart of music and sociality in Africa’s rural life (e.g., Chernoff 1979). No less poetic, however, is the coordinated efforts of loading, washing and sifting sand. And it is work that perhaps better exemplifies the vicissitudes of young men’s lives in West Africa today. Timing matters. A pattern of outward expanding circles begins with the swirling of the gravel and extends to the shape of the screen, then to the motions of the miners’ hands and to the shape of the pit, replicated thousands of times as new claims spread across the forest floor. These circles mirror the social circles that sustain the diamond economy. The labor, however, is young men’s work and it is characterized by young men’s bravado. It takes courage to face the forest, let alone move it out of the way and stack it into piles. Diamond mining is largely unskilled, but some are better at it than others. It is an effort directly tied to the raw physical power of the human form, and the work shapes the body in impossibly exquisite ways—though it does so at great risk and expense.

The centrality of the body to this mode of work, and the work that mining does on the body of the worker, is what animates this project as a visual ethnography. Still photography as ethnography works by “unsettling our accounts of the world” (Poole 2005, 160). Visualizing the relationship between bodies and work can be just such an unsettling for an audience largely alienated from this form of labor. Writing about the documentary photographer Sebastião Salgado’s Workers project, Julian Stallabrass (1997) argued that in those areas of the globe that the neoliberal global economy reserves for immaterial labor, the visual image of working bodies registers as dissonance. Work of that sort today exists almost exclusively beyond the field of vision of those whom it benefits. There is, therefore, a disorienting abruptness to the image of laboring bodies. “The immediate shock,” Stallabrass (1997, 2) writes, “. . . is simply to present contemporary scenes which should long have been banished from the perfectible neoliberal state; to show in a supposedly post-industrial world, scenes of vast pre-industrial labour.”

Alluvial diamond mining in West Africa is not the productive work of postindustrial skilled tradesmen, the only form of manual labor that most residents of the global North regularly encounter. Artisanal mining is purely destructive and extractive. This is labor normally relegated to other points on the globe or conducted deep underground or it is work done by machines. For most viewers, the image of bodies worked and working in this way is startling. There is an excessiveness to the images that terms like work and labor , when rendered as text on the page, simply cannot register. The work, like the miners who do it, has a militant masculinity about it. Text can chart the larger political economy in which the mines and miners are situated (something the images alone cannot adequately do). But only the momentary alienation sparked by the visual image of this mode of work conveys the materiality of West African diamond mining as labor.

The first frame in the series, for example, positions the miner against the pit. Though he has accomplished a great deal already, he is hardly victorious. By this point he has dug his pit, but the process of unearthing gems is far from over and in fact may prove fruitless even when it is complete. He remains surrounded by vastly more forest than he can hope to exploit. But the visual evidence suggests neither resignation nor defeat. Instead the miner has achieved a kind of guarded truce. It is a surprising moment that seems to belong as much to the world of combat as it does to the world of work, with the miner positioned as a soldier surveying recently captured but tenuously held ground. His stance is echoed in the final image of a worker’s shadow cast on the muddy water of the pit. Here, however, the suggestion of both work and war is more active. In the iconic style of socialist realism, his body conflates militancy and manual labor with a simultaneity that is virtually impossible to adequately convey in written ethnography. I have argued elsewhere for understanding the labors of these young men on the battlefield and on the mines as qualitatively identical, but bound by terms like war and work, the text alone inevitably reinscribes a qualitative difference between the two. The image collapses that distinction, and allows it to register as an affront.

Deploying photography’s capacity for discordant images, its power of excessive description (Poole 2005) is not, of course, the only form that the photo essay as visual ethnography can take. W. Eugene Smith’s canonical 1948 Life magazine series “Country Doctor” remains a touchstone for the photo essay as a genre. In it the photo essay acts as a narrative, a series of microdramas with scene setting introductions, suspenseful climax, and visual dénouement. The images in the project I have assembled here are organized less cinematically and more as a collection of figure studies. This is partly because the work of mining itself has no narrative arc (it is endlessly repetitive until—perhaps—the sudden moment of rupture when a major gem is discovered). But it is primarily a function of my desire to limit the scope to the material encounter of the miner’s body with this mode of work and to explore its ready translatability into other forms of violent labor. The argument of the project is synchronic rather than diachronic, and more conductive to a collection of meditations on a theme than to a storytelling progression.

For similar reasons I chose here not to pursue another key direction for visual anthropology, what Anna Grimshaw (2005) has identified as the camera’s unique capacity to record the uncertainties and contingencies of the ethnographic encounter. The camera edits fieldwork encounters in ways that can escape the control of anyone involved in the production of the image, a fact that allows visual work to position the anthropologist more clearly in relation to the ethnographic frame than could be possible in even the most self-reflective text. Yet aesthetically the images I have assembled here owe more to the modernist documentary tradition of photographers such as Lewis Hine, Margaret Bourke-White, or Smith: photographers whose subject position in their images of the work world are hardly neutral or obscured, but photographers who do not make positionality itself the subject of the image. Elsewhere I have critiqued that mode of documentary realism (Hoffman 2007b). So have many others both inside and outside visual anthropology. But here I am less concerned with the photo essay’s capacity for reflexivity than with its capacity for disruption—a modernist impulse inherent in the medium. Many of these images are shot from behind or above. They represent a privileged gaze, to be sure, but they are not images about the gaze per se.

It is the effort to visually render strange the familiar world of work that makes these images ethnographic. Drawing inspiration from Roland Barthes’s seminal Camera Lucida , I set out to open a conversation around a specific set of images that work toward a specific purpose: overcoming the limits of text to visually explore the materiality of a border form of work. This project is not a mediation on the photo essay as such, but an effort to put the photo essay to use as a mode of ethnography. “Nothing to do with a corpus,” as Barthes (1981, 8) put it, “just some bodies.” As the Society for Cultural Anthropology expands the scope for visual ethnography with this new venture, it will be exciting to see the many other borders the photo essay allows us to cross.

Reviewer Comments

Photographic figure studies as a mode of ethnography.

by Zeynep Devrim Gürsel

Beginning is not only a kind of action; it is also a frame of mind, a kind of work, an attitude, a consciousness. —Edward Said

This photo essay marks the beginning of a new section of the Cultural Anthropology website. As Said notes elsewhere, beginnings are not just something one does but also something one thinks about. My comments below are an engagement with this inaugural photo essay by Danny Hoffman and reflections on this section and visual anthropology more broadly. Beginnings present a time to think about parameters of enterprises—in this case, the potential uses of photo essays for anthropology. What will the norms of this new section be: Will the photographs always be by anthropologists? What makes a photograph ethnographically interesting? (This might be very different than the journalistic, historic, artistic or pedagogical value of a photograph.) Will the text, images, and layout always be produced by the same person? Given the online presentation, will there be an opportunity to incorporate multimedia? In short, this particular beginning provides an opportunity to collectively think about the photo essay as a mode of ethnography and to reflect on the status of visual ethnographies within our discipline today.

Shaping a Body of Work

In his aptly titled “Corpus: Mining The Border,” Danny Hoffman has given us a rich and provocative trove of text and images that compel us to reflect not merely on the labor behind war and mining near the Sierra Leone border, but also on the photo essay as a mode of ethnography. Hoffman explores many borders here: borders between nations, between text and images, between diverse visual genres and between forms of work. Other viewers/readers will surely add to this list. I’d like to focus on what Hoffman identifies as his conceptual center. In identifying the rationale behind choosing a visual mode for this investigation, he remarks: “The centrality of the body to this mode of work, and the work that the mining does on the body of the worker, is what animates this project as a visual ethnography.” It’s precisely this issue of animation I will address.

The object of analysis in this ethnography is the material bodies of these young men and how they are shaped by their various labors of place-making, whether that place is a mine or a nation. Appropriately, then, these images of young West African male bodies laboring are deliberately not presented in one of visual anthropology’s classic tropes: the step-by-step process or mode of production genre. Hoffman is not trying to teach us the process of how diamonds are mined. His investigation concerns the making of bodies, not diamonds. I take seriously Hoffman’s statement that “this project is not a mediation on the photo essay as such, but an effort to put the photo essay to use as a mode of ethnography.” However, a photo essay is also a body of work and it is to the making of this kind of body that I want to turn briefly in order to better consider it as a mode of ethnography.

A photo essay is a purposefully arranged collection of images often with text, a narrative in which visual elements create themes and dialogues. Hoffman is serving here as photo and text editor as well as anthropologist. Therefore, in order to engage with this photo essay as a mode of ethnography , we need to think not only about the individual images but how they have been arranged. In other words, I believe what makes a photograph or particular set of photographs of interest to anthropologists is not only what is in the image(s), but also how they are put into dialogue with other images, text and/or anthropological questions. Fortunately, Hoffman’s essay contains clues as to how this body of images has been worked on by the anthropologist. By sharing his visual strategies and editorial logic, Hoffman provides the project some reflexivity, even if he claims he is less interested in the photo essay’s capacity for reflexivity.

Working against the grain of narrative expectations inherent to the genre of photo essay, Hoffman states that he does not intend for his photographs to include a narrative arc. His genre is “meditations on a theme,” rather than “storytelling.” He argues that this choice in synchronic visual genre is because “the work of mining itself has no narrative arc” and is “endlessly repetitive.” Indeed, one of the most striking layouts in the essay is the arresting triptych showing three men sifting sand and gravel in a flooded pit. Though they are a series of images, they could also be a single line of laboring bodies, the repetitive nature of their work making it impossible to know whether to read the triptych from right to left or vice versa. What Hoffman’s photography therefore manages to convey is a sheer density of repetitive manual labor: clearly the three frames must have a chronology and, strictly speaking, some form of narrative arc and diachronic structure, but the triptych layout portrays not three individual bodies sifting sand in a particular place and time but functions as a synchronous representation of a workforce.

Hoffman’s creative choice in layout allows him to represent not only laboring individuals but a workforce, a pool of available labor. The interchangeable photographs emphasize the interchangeability of laboring bodies, and visually reproduce a culture where Hoffman tells us young men cycle through the region’s mines, men who “arrive and depart as strangers.” In this triptych, as well as the two images showing bodies working side by side if not necessarily collaboratively, Hoffman is most successful at achieving “an ethnographic portrait of the shape and texture of work.”

Such a project in still photographs is a very ambitious project, indeed. For while it is possible to photograph a human laboring, it is much harder to visualize the more abstract or diffuse political economy or the social circles that sustain diamond mining. Hoffman states that while text “can chart the larger political economy in which the mines and miners are situated,” images alone are inadequate for the task. Instead he substitutes a disciplined study of the “raw physical power of human form.” The resulting images are arranged as “a collection of figure studies.” This borrowing of an artistic genre, figure study, is an opportunity to make explicit the potentially discomforting aesthetic nature of the project: here is an anthropological project asking us “as anthropologists” to look at chiseled black bodies and to take note of the preindustrial work they are doing. Hoffman, in his own words, duplicates what he takes to be the visible work of the diamond mines. It is not merely Hoffman’s professional photographs that render these bodies beautiful; rather, Hoffman informs us, “the work shapes the body in impossibly exquisite ways—though at great risk and expense.” One form of production is substituted for another: chiseled bodies for chiseled stones. Both this work of photography and that of mining aestheticize preindustrial labor. The shapely bodies are visible; the risk and expense are not.

Trained by Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins’s (1993) seminal Reading National Geographic , we need to keep asking for whom and by whom the aestheticization is being done. The absence of even bare-bones captions with information about location and dates might contribute to what Hoffman assumes is a productive “disorienting abruptness” in these images of laboring bodies. Yet the lack of captions also leaves these photographs unmoored, possibly rendering visible a moment where the “temporal displacement” is also of those photographed by the anthropologist. Hoffman’s discussion of startling preindustrial labor that he claims will be unimaginable to most viewers (despite the dense local and international networks his ethnography reveals) suggests that the critique contained in Johannes Fabian’s (1983) Time and the Other remains relevant. While Hoffman’s (2005, 2007a, 2011) other work attests to his long and complex ethnographic engagement with young men in the region, there is little in the photographs or text here that explicitly contextualizes the figures he studies. For the viewer/reader, these human forms remain anonymous human forms. Put more provocatively, how do these photographs differ from Marey or Muybridge’s late-nineteenth century studies of human locomotion? Notably, they are taken not in a studio but very much in the field with the men presumably in their everyday habits of dress (or undress). Nonetheless, the figures in the images remain equally anonymous and out of historical time.

Hoffman is not only a sophisticated and highly skilled photographer, but also a scholar aware of many different photographic traditions (see Hoffman 2007b), a position that requires us to take his editorial choices all the more seriously. He is no doubt very familiar with the oft-repeated criticism of images that render beautiful horror and hardship (such as excruciating physical labor), for he cites the single project at which such criticism has most publicly been leveled: Sebastiao Salgado’s Workers project. Hoffman seems to be grappling in earnest with how to move beyond such debates that are productive as critique, but do not generate alternate ways of imaging. Encouraging either less aesthetic images or solely images of leisure and comfort, or else abandoning visual production altogether would surely be insipid solutions. After all, the photo essay became a popular and highly influential form of visual communication in the mid-twentieth century partly because it provided aesthetic pleasure. The visual scholar Ariella Azoulay (2008) suggests doing away with the distinction between the aesthetic and the political, emphasizing that “no images can exist outside the aesthetic plane.” Freed then from the aesthetic/political binary, we should instead rigorously engage with the political stakes of the aesthetic. Hoffman’s project makes it incumbent upon us not merely to look at what is aesthetically pleasing, but to ask how what is aesthetically compelling came to be so. For whom is this beauty meaningful? For whom are these bodies “exquisite”? Where more apt for such a project than the diamond mines—that troubled site of the crossing of beauty with global politics and economics?

Figure Study as Participant-Observation

Hoffman’s idea of a photo essay as a collection of figure studies is particularly provocative for anthropology. If figure study is “a representation made for study purposes with a live model as the subject matter,” then is it not another mode of ethnography based on participant-observation? I’d like to return here to the issue of what animates a project as a visual ethnography. How is putting the photo essay to use as a mode of ethnography different than illustrating fieldwork or anthropological findings? How might anthropological knowledge animate a photographic project whether the camera is in the hands of an anthropologist or not? Most importantly for our purposes here, what kind of scholarly engagement can a photo essay animate in an audience of anthropologists?

Azoulay’s work is an extremely useful provocation for visual anthropology. 1 In her latest book, The Civil Contract of Photography (Azoulay 2008), she is calling for an anthropological engagement with photographs without naming it as such:

The photograph bears the seal of the photographic event, and reconstructing this event requires more than just identifying what is shown in the photograph. One needs to stop looking at the photograph and instead start watching it. The verb “to watch” is usually used for regarding phenomena or moving pictures. It entails dimensions of time and movement that need to be reinscribed in the interpretation of the still photographic image.

Watching photographs, for Azoulay, moves debates about photography beyond the dualistic relationship between the viewer and the photograph (as she claims is the case in the work of Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag) to a space of social relations between the photographer, the viewer and the photographed. Azoulay insists the photographed is not merely a visible presence but an active participant. The universal validity and political ramifications of this larger claim merit a longer debate, one beyond the scope of this review. However, if, as in Hoffman’s work here, we are concerned with photographs based on long-term anthropological fieldwork, taken by the anthropologist himself engaged in participant observation, Azoulay’s claim that the photographed is an active participant would seem to be a given in putting the photo essay to use as a mode of ethnography. In other words, having read Hoffman’s other work, I have no doubt that his research is based on long engagements with his informants whose lives he has charted through significant transitions. But how is this visible in the photo essay before us? Watching Hoffman’s photographs might entail what Deborah Poole (2005) calls a productive form of suspicion. For example, it might lead us to think beyond the usual critique of fixing native subjects as particular racial types instead to ask: how is it that photography simultaneously sediments and fractures the solidity of race as a visual and conceptual fact?

Of course, race is not something that Hoffman addresses explicitly, at least not in the text of this photo essay, and yet it is part of the excessive description that cannot be edited out of his images. Hoffman acknowledges that these photographs represent a privileged gaze but wants them to not be about the (or his) gaze per se. Nonetheless, I am left wondering if the photo essay as a mode of ethnography can ever escape being always also about the gaze. This is not an argument for explicitly self-reflexive work. Rather, it is a call for a reflexivity that does not revolve around a self—Hoffman’s particular encounters in the field in 2010—but instead allows for the viewer/reader to reconstruct the photographic event as a thick description, a still image with all of the social and political context which it implies. Hoffman deliberately turns his attention away from the photo essay’s capacity for reflexivity in favor of its capacity for generative disruption. I am less convinced that these two are separable.

Hoffman writes that he eschews both reflexivity and a narrative arc because of his “desire to limit the scope to the material encounter of the miner’s body with this mode of work and to explore its ready translatability into other forms of violent labor. “ Now, even if it were possible for still photographs to make visible the material encounter of the miner’s body with mining by showing the body in labor or being labored upon by the work itself, “its ready translatability into other forms of violent labor” is knowable to the viewer/reader only because of the anthropologist’s textual reporting on his encounter with the miners. How might such an exploration also have been rendered more visible to the viewer/reader? While I concur wholeheartedly with Hoffman about the potential for the photo essay to function as a mode of ethnography, in the spirit of contributing to a generative conversation about visually animated ethnography, I want to speak to a few areas in this particular photo essay where I believe the visual ethnography might have been pushed even further.

How might the chains of labor in the makeshift camps or social circles that sustain the diamond economy be visualized? Hoffman mentions these things—limiting them, that is, to text—when he might have invited them into a more complicated visual field. The triptych showing men commuting through the forest and playing soccer seems to be a beginning in this direction. What might photographs of the mentioned tents between old houses, or squatters in the ruins of the school or half-built mosque, have added to this essay? Would they detract anything?

Hoffman importantly analyzes the blurred boundaries between labor crews and militia squads and makes a striking argument that there is “a qualitative similarity for many young men between the tasks and rewards of war fighting and the tasks and rewards of mining, campaigning, or tapping rubber.” Presently the visual argument for this lies in Hoffman’s own interpretation of the first frame in the series. What we are to see here, according to Hoffman’s textual voiceover, is a collapse of the distinction between war and work on the part of the young men. Does the image in fact collapse that distinction? War is not visible in this frame but only in the author’s comment. How would we react to a photo essay composed of photographs showing young men engaged in mining, fighting, campaigning, and tapping rubber edited together? I am thinking here of Jean Rouch’s brilliant use of juxtaposition to make visual arguments such as the famous cut between a Hauka spirit possession ceremony and a colonial British military procession in Les maitres fous (1954). How might such juxtapositioning function in a still visual medium?

Alternately, to keep the focus exclusively on the miner’s body, are there bodily marks or gestures that blur boundaries between war and work? Scar stories, for example? Portraits of both war and work are differently told—though possibly not aestheticized—through the physical scars left on the workforce behind these activities. This type of photo essay would almost certainly demand either significantly more ethnographic text for each image or possibly the addition of audio interviews. In fact, Hoffman’s accompanying text begins with “the sounds on the mines” and is a paragraph-long meditation on what can and cannot be aurally registered at the Mayengema mines. Can we think of multimedia as a mode of ethnography? What might be lost or gained if this work were a multimedia piece, rather than a photo essay? Would it animate a different form of engagement?

The Status of the Photo Essay

This review of “Corpus: Mining the Border” is written for the launch of the Photo Essays section of the Cultural Anthropology website. On the one hand, I am encouraged by this initiative and honored to be a part of this inaugural conversation. As a scholar committed to the visual as a field as well as a mode of inquiry and a form of ethnographic representation, I am inspired and heartened that one of the most discipline’s most visible web platforms should feature photo essays. And yet I worry that there is a different, less serious status being granted to projects like this photo essay. What will viewers/readers make of the absence of a blind peer review or editorial process? I’m not concerned merely with academic fairness, but rather, with how the lack of such processes germane to textual publishing contribute to the perception of visual scholarship.

We need to think critically not only about photography, but about how images are brokered. Image brokers are the people who act as intermediaries for images by moving them or restricting their movement, thereby enabling or policing their availability to new audiences (Gürsel 2012). By inaugurating this photo essay form, the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA) is serving as an image broker. What are the terms, then, of this brokering? Does this new online photo essay format promote visual ethnography or marginalize it further? For example, Cultural Anthropology published Hoffman’s excellent article “Violence, Just in Time: War and Work in Contemporary West Africa” in the journal just a few months before this online photo essay. The article contained no images. The photographs that comprise “Corpus: Mining the Border” are clearly informed by the same ethnographic research and theoretical concerns, yet they are being published separately and evidently with a different set of academic—or is it aesthetic?—expectations. I invite us all to debate the merits and costs of this separation of images in the SCA’s publishing program and believe this is a very timely discussion for the discipline at large. 2

A twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Writing Culture has recently been published with a foreword (by the former editor of Cultural Anthropology ) highlighting how it changed the face of ethnography. Interpretive anthropology was animated by a desire to “contribute to an increasing visibility of the creative (and in a broad sense poetic) processes by which ‘cultural’ objects are invented and treated as meaningful.” Perhaps we ought to treat such an anniversary as a new beginning as well, not to return to the by now tired debates in which everyone has long ago staked their position, but to seize the opportunity to rigorously interrogate modes of ethnography for a new generation. Having thoroughly debated self -reflexivity, perhaps it is time for media/modal reflexivity.

It is time to begin evaluating anthropological scholarship not only on its content but also on its chosen medium. 3 I certainly don’t mean that all anthropology articles should now have superficial visuals or multimedia attached to them. (The colonization of classroom lectures by obligatory PowerPoint is proof enough that mandatory visuals are by no means necessarily illuminating.) Rather, at a moment when many anthropologists are engaging with different forms of media, it is now feasible and meaningful to make the choice of medium one aspect of evaluating anthropological work. There has been a lot of work done to legitimate visual work in anthropology, as in the “ Guidelines for the Evaluation of Ethnographic Visual Media ” created by the Society for Visual Anthropology. But I am asking if we have come to a moment where we ask not whether a particular visual ethnography is adequate or valuable or ought to “count,” but rather begin with the question: what is the mode of this ethnographic inquiry, and how can we engage with it in an analytically rigorous way? Different modes and mediums require that makers, brokers, and the reader/viewers develop new forms of rigorous analytic engagement. What do we still need to learn as a discipline to debate costs and benefits of using different media? Will we ever ask: was text the best mode for this ethnography? I believe that articulating answers to such a question will help develop analytic rigor across media. I hope that many of you will join this conversation and contribute to a discussion not only on putting the photo essay to use as a mode of ethnography, but also on the theoretical claims and ethnographic material that Hoffman has shared.

1. Azoulay’s work is similar, in this sense, to the work of artist and critic Allan Sekula and art historian John Tagg, and indeed builds on the work of both.

2. It is true that films are corralled off at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, rather than integrated into panels. However, this is a new beginning and beginnings are a moment to reflect on forms.

3. My interest is in contributing to a debate about how visual scholarship can most effectively be part of a diverse range of anthropological conversations. I am inspired by Ethnographic Terminalia, as “a project aimed at fostering art-based practices among anthropologists and other cultural investigators or critics” that is analytically sharp and highly media-reflexive. Its website has been central to its efforts to gain greater recognition for the work of visual anthropology, serves as both a tool for promotion and an archive for legitimation. Collectively, all those involved in Ethnographic Terminalia have creatively celebrated boundaries and borders without exalting them and have launched a generative conversation about the terms of ethnography. Yet that is a conversation happening on a different website, one that might not be sought out by those not already engaged in some form of visual anthropology. The beginning, of which this review is a part, requires the thinking of the stakes and productive possibilities of having similar formal conversations on the Cultural Anthropology website.

Not Just Bodies

by Alan Klima

Danny Hoffman's broad strokes and starkly juxtaposed, figural swathes of color and shade are conscious and deliberate challenges for a conversation on possible meanings of the photo essay for anthropology today.

I quite like the aesthetic eye of the images, understand the author's attempt to situate that style for the reader, and understand the author's attempt to explain why the style is not otherwise. Although sometimes reading like a strategic fending off of template criticisms readers might have come across in the past and tucked in their back pocket should they ever have the occasion to come across an image again, the ruminations on visual anthropology do accomplish, at the very least, this highlighting of Hoffman's strong sense of aesthetic purpose, one I would further call attention to in the abstract and formalist elements of his image composition. Although still resembling the aesthetic of photojournalism, to me these photos tip quite a bit toward the abstract in their broad patches of color and large shapes, and less toward the prosaic sensationalism that photo-journalism seeks.

I don't find the photographs the least bit shocking, except in the sense of "wow, soil can look like that!" And this is so even as I am surrounded by the equally brilliant, though red-tinted, soil in Thailand. Neither did I see the content or form of what is in the photographs as “qualitatively identical” to warfare nor that the image collapses the distinction between work and war (while text can only distinguish them), as the author asserts. In fact, contrary to the author's view, I would need it to be explained, in text, exactly why they are the same as war; otherwise, I won’t see it. And still, I am not sure that I would. As image only, I have to say I find them qualitatively identical to rice farming in rural Thailand, and it would take a whole lot of words to override my eyes.

The adamant style and stance of the images, themselves, however do accomplish Hoffman’s stated goal of providing a jarring impetus for new meaning of the reproducible image mode to anthropology. How he characterizes this intervention is, by contrast, worth questioning a bit.

Hoffman’s presumption seems to rest on an idea that the photographs are communicating brutal labor, and that this would be shocking to the viewer: “For most viewers, the image of bodies worked and working in this way is startling.” Although I appreciate the photography very much and do find something jarring about it, it is not due to the seeing of the harsh work depicted in them. What I see in any given photograph—as image, quite apart from what I am told is there—is people digging with shovels, sifting about in the water, etc., something I see all the time, and I imagine this is just as familiar to most viewers. It is even more curious to be told that this is “not the productive work of postindustrial skilled tradesmen, the only form of manual labor that most residents of the global North regularly encounter.” Never mind that this is an essay on the Cultural Anthropology website, whose visitors are probably not confined to continual residence in the global North—my university home is in Northern California, where manual work in the hot sun abounds and can’t not be seen. How many other places in the global North must there be like California? I grew up the son of an academic and an artist all the way on the other coast, and had to spend long periods of my youth, like many around me, in manual labor, bending sheets of metal to the same forty-five-degree angle for hours on end, or stacking mountainous piles of lumber and damaging my body. Not that this helps me to assimilate or understand the reality of diamond mining one bit (well, a bit). It’s that, without being told the story around the acts depicted in the photos, there is little to distinguish them from all the other forms of unskilled manual labor that are very close and common in the North, if you only look around a bit, and everywhere else for that matter. Destructive or productive, there is no way to tell from the image. People stand knee-deep in water and bend down in rice farming, and have for thousands of years. Alluvial diamond mining itself may be shocking, but these are not the kind of sensation-mining photos that can deliver it one swoop. The stereotypical photojournalist's goal of bringing shocking news, or the stereotypical ethnographer's goal of bringing exotic otherness, is simply not accomplished in these simple scenes of what are, visually alone, ubiquitous acts.

I do not deny, however, Hoffman’s assertion that there is something jarring about this photography, nor does my intellect permit me to deny that there may be something here in this diamond mining that is, in truth, insanely harsher than anything I normally see among migrant workers on the hot, smoggy plains of California, or—certainly—have experienced myself. But we are supposed to understand that it is only the image that can communicate this material level of labor, a materiality that is ethnographically exotic to the North and thus defines the purpose of this photo essay: “overcoming the limits of text to visually explore the materiality of a border form of work,” where the “bodies of the miners are stripped to their essence by hard repetitive work and the hard repetitive landscape,” and therefore there is “an excessiveness to the images that terms like work and labor, when rendered as text on the page, simply cannot register.”

Yet what is jarring is not the unfamiliarity of unskilled manual labor, but the fact that it is actually not shocking at all to view these photographs, and yet somehow, it should be. This it should be is integrated into the composition and attraction of these photographs: the aesthetic shapes of the scenes, and especially that of soil and the body, strike the eye with form, and yet are not fully grasped, reckoned, realized as content, as real-life experience, at least not as image. The lack of shock, moreover, is made all the more obvious by its pairing with abstract forms of aesthetic beauty. It is the beauty of the photographs, and simultaneous richness of presence to the soil and body, creating a jarring disjuncture that calls attention simultaneously to the struggle depicted in figure and ground, between the figures and the ground, and a struggle for the viewer to reckon with what powers and forces—not only matter, but energy too—are at work here.

This leaves the question of the experience of this labor open, because, in my view, there is also present in the images a human power that is truly awesome and beautiful and unfathomable and yet somehow carried in the photography.

And, which is quite unlike the stripped bare materiality of manual labor Hoffman asserts in his textually expressed views.

True, in repetitive, manual labor there are aches. There is exhaustion, and damage to the functioning of the body, but there are also all the thoughts and reactions to those sensations in the body, which in turn interact with them, amplify and alter them, a process that if watched carefully reveals that it is impossible to tell where one starts and where the other ends. And in any case, consciousness is required for there to be any feeling whatsoever, unlike a corpse, zombie, or patient under general anesthesia, where materiality exists but pain and suffering does not.

The experience of manual labor is not a simple material fact and no worker is ever ground down to a pure material level. In fact, labor transpires in a mental medium, including all kinds of thoughts, reactions, and, indeed, stories. These miners are working within a story, even if it is not obvious. Even if there is no narrative arc to mining itself, there is for the miners.

And story, in manual labor, is perhaps the most painful aspect of it all. Whatever story is—and it is various and it can change—it sits over your shoulder, multiplying itself into more stories, into resistance to what is happening, longing for another kind of life, and all kinds of desperation. One procedure that is absolutely fundamental to performing brutal manual labor is shutting out this story (whatever it is), watching for its insistent return, and then banishing and re-banishing it, again and again. Some might be so good at it that they no longer realize what they are doing. Most people I have spoken to, however, never completely banish the stories, but they can shut them out for a time. If you can’t do that, you can’t work for long, because it will seize upon the so-called material sensations that are themselves already mixed in a soup of mental reactivities and tip the whole unbalance in a more calamitous way: more pain, probably injuries and sickness, and certainly no will to go on.

And so both the simple idea of material labor, and the idea Hoffman offers of story and narrative that are somehow not present in the arc of simple, repetitive digging in the soil (narrative as might be defined by pretending twentieth-century literature never happened) close off too neatly the idea of labor in the material world in a way that has been too common for too long. It also fits neatly into the idea that the material world is the province of the image and photography. Each to its own place.

In the essay, the proper place for text is to describe the context, set the scene, explain the political and economic setting. To me, a most unfortunate career for writing.

Then, in comes the image: to do what text cannot, and the photo essay becomes an essential antidote to the written word.

Actually, I share with Hoffman a hope for the photo essay—and any other manifestations of anthropology-through-image that may arise—but if that hope is conjured in the figure of nontext, against text, with each given its appropriate purview, then old assumptions are restrengthened, the same measures of inadequacy apportioned out, which marginalize the visual on the one hand and flatten the textual on the other. In fact, no worse outcome for the revival of visual anthropology could be possible than reinforcing the atrophied and lifeless conception of text that, if not consciously held in the ethnographic mind, is nevertheless demonstrated to be dominant in a significant portion of anthropological prose.

Photography has more intrinsic value than as antidote to the inadequacies of prose. It can make a better case for itself than that in anthropology. And, after all, most of the limits of text Hoffman speaks of are, in anthropology, actually limits either in the writers themselves or in the system by which prose is selected and published, not of text itself.

Instead, photography should rise to the occasion and assert itself, make no excuses and no apologies for its existence. And to do that it might be helpful at the same time to recognize the immense power of writing, and accomplishments of writing. In fact, it is no easy thing at all to match the power of writing in addressing the experience of brutal labor (and such labor is never simply material, not for the people who do it). For Hoffman, through his photography, to have matched writing in this task is no small accomplishment, and it was not an accomplishment that was made simply by switching media.

Hoffman’s images have risen to this occasion, and despite what he might say, open up for us our idea of labor and materiality rather than pinch them down into familiar tread.

And so, to return again to the photographs: rather than feeling shocked at the harsh labor I was visually exposed to—actually a common photojournalist’s goal, I can assure you, having asked at least a few—I found myself kicking myself to try and force myself to feel the extremities of the experience here, but the wall of Hoffman's photographs was something I could not push myself through.

Of course, I am not so naive as to throw up my hands and declare photography inadequate.

Instead, I became all the more fascinated by the photographs and appreciative of the work Hoffman has done. And this continuously escaping affect, if you will, is no fault of the photography. In fact it is precisely this tension which is so subtly involving about the photos: that every piece of information was telling me that there was something extreme, special, alter about the experience of the bodies in these pictures, and yet I am unable to pick it up and instead see form. This discomfort itself is part of what is of value in the photographs for me, because nevertheless the constant beckoning of sweat and soil is so intensely present and would not let me stop trying.

A too-neat conception of materiality considerably closes these and other disjunctures, closing off what should be an open question on the nature of labor, in a way Hoffman’s photographs themselves do not.

This particular kind of openness is not as present in the early work of the great photographer Sebastião Salgado, for instance, where narrative within the frame is thick and obvious—the gold mining scenes being the obvious comparison. How different, and how easy and comfortable in this sense, are Salgado's early and mid-career photos, where one gets an overload of meaning in a baroque sense of the fantastic and strange, even Bosch-like hell evoked at times, and magically so: surprisingly, through figures that can be only ever real, unlike Bosch who did it through imagined grotesqueries (or at least those who have not actually seen hell might believe). In Salgado, the radical alterity of brutal labor is spelled out for us, as it were, and its shocking reality is indeed conveyed through the very surreality of the compositions.

If photojournalism has a most highest and unattainable level of heaven, it is Sebastião Salgado.

Something quite different is happening in these photographs. Context and strange awesome scenes are not attended to, and something much quieter remains, held in the hand of abstract form.

And that both is—and isn’t—the materiality that Hoffman is right to say is an important evocation in the images.

Precisely: this pointing to the earth element of body and soil, the material aspect of it, and yet, with a tension—and this is what is so jarring and challenging about the photographs—because of course nothing is less suggestive of the earth element than the abstract shape and form and the aesthetic balances of light, dark, color and line of these photos. Whereas Salgado elided this tension through the immense storytelling functions of his photos, letting the baroque extravagance of his realism and the overflow of meaning almost deceptively distract from what can only be said to be an equal emphasis on figural form, Hoffman leaves us no out: either remain transfixed by abstraction, which he well knows is impossible for any caring individual to do, or jump ship, ponder the unattainable connection to the experience of this kind of work, this life situation, this labor.

As in the halting, liminal beginning and first picture of the series: not yet shocked by the wash of golden soil that is about to flail itself against the retina in the photos to come, the eye can at first pause, along with or behind a pause in the contemplative pose of the first figure, who is perhaps hesitant to begin work, who is perhaps surveying work to be done, or perhaps is marinating in that moment after hard work, a moment that lingers on longer than you intended, and it’s so difficult to start up again.

Then the second photo in this mostly warmly lit series: a distinctively cool color scheme, yet hitting off the first hint of what is really to come in the rest: broad swathes and patches of form and color in harsh juxtaposition. In this photo, one also picks up the first hint of struggle, perhaps with exhaustion or with the limits of the body, perhaps with soil. In this figure of simultaneous work and rest, and like in most conventional narrative beginnings, it looks as though the strength and power of the protagonist may be defeated.

But this is all called into question with the frantic energy of the third photo, where—in an oddly angled shot and oddly angled act of work—plants spread their knives, competing against each other to mine the sun, and the body grows fingers in a frantic race to contact, one is told, diamonds (which we never see). In this strife, the plants seek contact with a sun that gives without receiving in a project that can only ever end in their death, while the fingers that dig, sort, sift for limited, unseen objects—their project does not die. This search itself is as immortal as the desires and systems driving it are limitless, can never end, and will outlive these hands for sure.

In the fourth view, a series framed and colored in a way so reminiscent of the bathing scenes in Trinh’s Reassemblage , there is juxtaposition of time-lapsed shots reminiscent of her breakup of cinematic form, and yet in its adherence to temporal series so unlike it is as well. Here the classic ethnographic narrative of this is how it is done: A, B, C is adhered to, in thumbnail form appearing to be a strange panoramic shot but in close up actually an interested study in a complex action simply presented.

And for that, so disjunctive with the high-stakes flurry of the preceding image.

By the fifth image there can be no doubt where the essay’s aesthetic allegiances lie. Here Grecian, statuesque attraction to the male body combines with the strongest attention to large swathes of aesthetic form, in the most abstract and yet most telling photo of the series. In the midst of all these large forms, the eye is drawn soon into something, tiny, intricate, and exuding from the surface, the sweat: a cool reminder of how inscrutable—as photograph—the experience of this labor is. No heat whatsoever is communicated in the formal line and shape, and yet, there it is: dancing on the surface, the indisputable evidence, all the clearer for not having been felt in the viewer, the indisputable traces scintillating in the power of labor meeting heat, and the struggle that began in Image 2 now looks like it might be swinging the other way: a power of unknown limits is at work here, under the skin. Which is more impressive? Is it the fact that this miraculous human power exists at all, and can be unleashed at will, as seen here, or is it the fact, more known through the political and economic context, that this miracle can seem to be chained, that there is—in what is nonvisible to this particular photo essay—a power-harnessing-power, native to the social structures that render seemingly necessary this hard work in the sun, a power compacted by many confluences of fear of death with greed for shiny objects, with the numerical excitement for profit and wealth, with the ache to control land, people, other bodies. But I digress, as this photo does not call up that daunting awe. It is regnant with power, only power.

And so, in Image 6, it is no surprise that—returning to the prosaic world—even a sea of golden dirt cannot defeat these slight figures, who, in a more staid, less sensational version of photojournalism, are demonstrating the action that defines them within their life-in-this-text.

In the following view, a somewhat disjunctive series, in discontinuous semiosis:

The journey to the interior.

Then, a human will exacted upon nature, tearing like monster claws into the soil.

in the larger scale of things, and

Finally, the soaring life of—again—this power that cannot be contained within the frame of labor, not within the frame of exploitation: a power of amazing reach, unfurling itself in the failing light of day on a great peal of energy riding beyond pain, beyond all creaky calls of the body that is dying in every moment.

Dying, but it does not matter.

Not matter.

And now, in Image 8, returning again to the strange orange glow of the soil, there is something of a blow delivered here, but almost an afterthought. One foot barely hovering off the ground, still hints of soaring, but not high, not really flying at all, but propped on the weight of a force delivered into the soil, which, in this framing, no longer dwarfs and surrounds the man but appears to have already yielded to him.

Image 9: back to banality. It is work after all. Moments repeating themselves. Circles.

And finally, shadow upon swirling water, another figure of domination, posed in a mastery of the elements, and yet, as the final photo, suggesting also something of a ghost, something of the acorporeal, just form of light, just shadow: which, after all, is all there really is here anywhere in the photos. That this is photography, light and shadow, is something we are not encouraged to forget for long in this photo essay, if ever. And yet . . .

And yet still the seeping muck of water and mud, the fine as well as chunky granulations of the sun-baked soil all around, suggest so much of the elemental, the material as well, so resonant and goopy and almost palpable. Here, the soil is given power and presence, and the human: it remains a question. Power, and yet of what kind, what being?

Reader/Viewer Comments

by Eleana Kim

This inaugural photo essay and the accompanying reviews are wonderfully rich and provocative. I had a number of initial reactions to the essay that were eloquently articulated by the reviewers, particularly around the gaze, the notion of labor as startling and how to view bodies presented in ways that eschew narrative arc and foreground formal simplicity. What I'm most interested in is how the images, in an odd way, through the narrow focus on the sites of physical labor and laboring bodies, reproduces the alienated labor of capital. Perhaps this is the point, in a way, and the convergence of politics and aesthetics becomes clear through this interpretation. Yet, looking at these laboring bodies, I wondered how one could disrupt the smooth aesthetics of the images to convey a sense of the ethnographer as a laboring body (as opposed to merely an observing presence), especially through the medium of still photography (for a fascinating project on labor through a distributed video collective, see Harun Farocki’s new project: Labour in a Single Shot ) and how the (nonalienated) labor of the ethnographer/imagemaker is produced alongside the (alienated) labor of the photographic subjects. The use of photography in the production of generic bodies or anatomies has a very long history, as Zeynep Gürsel reminds us. In referring to Les Maîtres Fous , she also reminded me of the ways in which the Hauka possession ritual that is the putative subject of Rouch’s film is the unconscious subtext for the other narrative, of migrant labor. This is a form of reflexivity (however overdetermined Rouch’s resistant interpretation may seem to us now) that returns us to the political economic contexts in which these migrants labor and struggle for social power.

by Jenny Tang

Danny Hoffman’s photo essay, “Corpus: Mining the Border,” presents ten vividly colored photographs of young black male bodies juxtaposed with text describing the paradigms and structures that circumscribe their experiences living and working in border mining towns between Sierra Leone and Liberia. The contents and format of this body of work are immediately fraught with tension. On the one hand, the photographs, beautiful abstractions that, to me, recall the work of Robert Mapplethorpe much more than the modernist documentary photographers that Hoffman cites as his predecessors, represent these bodies as aesthetic entities. On the other hand, the text that accompanies these photographs recalls the mainstream photojournalism that one might find on the websites of the Times and other major newspapers.

Hoffman insists that he is “less concerned with the photo-essay’s capacity for reflexivity than with its capacity for disruption” by “unsettling an audience largely alienated from this form of labor.” While an act of disruption may unsettle and even redefine borders (and serve to render the familiar strange), it may also render visible previously unnoticed seams and lines of distinction. In doing so, does not the act of disruption itself help constitute the border that it seeks so earnestly to unmoor? Thus, what these photographs seem to disrupt is not so much the border between the privileged viewer’s life and the laborious lives of these men, but the border between word and image, between ethnographic labor and aesthetic labor. This seems to me to be the fundamental aporia that Hoffman’s photo essay struggles with, and a paradox that is made explicit on a formal level.

To begin with, Hoffman asserts that images have a power of excessive description which text cannot and does not have access to: text can chart the larger political economy in which the mines and miners are situated (something the images alone cannot adequately do). But only the momentary alienation sparked by the visual image of this mode of work conveys the materiality of Western African diamond mining as labor.

Yet Hoffman’s text does not chart the larger political economy of miners, besides giving brief descriptions of Mayengema and the fighting factions on both sides of the border. Instead, the text describes and insists on the materiality and sensuality of abstract terms like work and labor :

The sounds on the mines around Mayengema are scratchy, percussive sounds.

Work on the mines is sisyphean. Diamonds are carried across this landscape by century after century of moving water and shifting earth. One accesses them by panning creeks and river floors or by scrapping away the topsoil.

The work is always hot and always hard.

And although Hoffman self-consciously refrains from composing a photo essay cinematically, with the arc of a narrative, the text itself seems to supplement or compensate for the lack of a visual narrative with a textual one. Hoffman describes the process of mining and even narrates the possible scandal of a crew slipping away in the middle of the night because they had calculated and judged the value of the discovered stone to be greater than the risk of flight. The place of narrative is made most explicit when, in the eighth frame of his photo essay, Hoffman harks back to the first image in the series. For seven frames, we have had no explanation or analysis of this opening image, and to have one now is startling and almost confrontational. This momentary asynchrony makes apparent to the viewer/reader that, while the text and images do not form a narrative in the sense that the images do not illustrate the text, we have still been enmeshed all along in a different sort of narrative.

Like the concentric circles that Hoffman describes, in which the circles of gravel and pits “mirror the social circles that sustain the diamond economy,” we are meant to extrapolate from Hoffman’s abstractions and generalizations some sense of the specificity of these men’s lives. The mood and the tone of Hoffman’s writing seems at times to verge on magical realism, and fittingly so, for the genre of magical realism constructs a world in which the transcendental and the historical live side by side. Hoffman’s doomed American ore company, for example, echoes the doomed banana company of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude :

These towns are swollen with men. For Mano River Kongo it is not the first time. This was once a major site for the excavation of iron ore, until a mudslide in the early 1980s destroyed much of the settlement. The American ore company quickly departed, leaving what remained of Mano River Kongo to wither and die.

What this amounts to, as Zeynep Gürsel astutely notes, is that these men remain “anonymous and out of historical time.” Meanwhile, the images seem not so much to signify the excess materiality of labor that cannot be captured through words, but the aesthetic labor of Hoffman himself. His camera seems interested, not only in making sense of these bodies shaped by and exchanged in labor, but the sensuality of the bodies themselves. The erotic undertone that runs throughout these images seem part and parcel of a longstanding discourse that renders black male bodies just that: bodies, without faces and without names; bodies whose excessive energies, when harnessed, may produce, refine, and even make profit, but unhindered, threatens an excess of sexual drive. This is a particularly American discourse stemming from our history of slavery, yet it is one which Hoffman’s images cannot escape. Hoffman writes that it is the “effort to visually render strange the familiar world of work that makes these images ethnographic,” but perhaps what is rendered strange is not the world of work but our conceptions of race and blackness, displaced onto an alien context.

Ultimately, Hoffman’s photo essay makes clear that an ethnographic project is always already an aesthetic one. Perhaps this is why Hoffman feels a kinship with Lewis Hine and other modernist documentary photographers, for they were working at a time when the place of photography as aesthetic object (as embodied by the Pictorialists and Photo-Secessionists) and as social document was being debated, and these oppositional positions articulated. For Hoffman, to disrupt the border between these two is to question the stakes on which the distinctions were made in the first place.

Azoulay, Ariella. 2008. The Civil Contract of Photography . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography . Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Originally published in 1980.

Chernoff, John. 1979. African Rhythms and African Sensibilities: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object . New York: Columbia University Press.

Grimshaw, Anna. 2005. “Eyeing the Field: New Horizons for Visual Anthropology.” In Visualizing Anthropology: Experimenting with Image-Based Ethnography , edited by Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz, 17–30. Portland, Ore.: Intellect.

Gürsel, Zeynep Devrim. 2012. “ The Politics of Wire Service Photography: Infrastructures of Representations in a Digital Newsroom .” American Ethnologist 39, no. 1: 71–89.

Hoffman, Danny. 2005. “ The Brookfields Hotel (Freetown, Sierra Leone) .” Public Culture 17, no. 1: 55–74.

_____. 2007a. “ The City as Barracks: Freetown, Monrovia, and the Organization of Violence in Postcolonial African Cities .” Cultural Anthropology 22, no. 3: 400–428.

_____. 2007b. “ The Disappeared: Images of the Environment at Freetown’s Urban Margins .” Visual Studies 22, no. 2: 104–119.

_____. 2011a. “ Violence, Just in Time: War and Work in West Africa .” Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 1: 34–57.

_____. 2011b. The War Machines: Young Men and Violence in Sierra Leone and Liberia . Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Lutz, Catherine A., and Jane L. Collins. 1993. Reading National Geographic . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Poole, Deborah. 2005. “ An Excess of Description: Ethnography, Race, and Visual Technologies .” Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 159–79.

Stallabrass, Julian. 1997. “ Sebastião Salgado and Fine Art Photojournalism .” New Left Review , no. 223.

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May 14, 2024 | Tiana Tran

A Reflection on Asian Culture

UConn Health Pharmacist Tiana Tran shares an essay for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month

From left: UConn Health pharmacist Tiana Tran celebrates Tết with her sister, Viviana Tran, mother, Bachloan Phan, and father, Thoi Tran, February 2024. (Photo provided by Tiana Tran)

Growing up as a Vietnamese American, Vietnamese culture was perpetually ingrained into my home life. While both my sister and I were born in America, our parents made sure to include our culture in our childhoods. We were raised speaking Vietnamese and we spent quality time with our grandparents, which helped to solidify our language skills. We listened to Vietnamese music, played Vietnamese board games, and learned the history of our family. We enjoyed Vietnamese dishes nearly every day and celebrated Vietnamese traditions such as welcoming our departed ancestors home to eat dinner with us as well as colorful Lunar New Year festivities with family. As a result, my culture is very integral to my identity and I am proud of who I am.

Today, my family and I still perpetuate these traditions; just this February, my family got together and celebrated Tết, the Lunar New Year, in our own special way. I feel very grateful that my family and my culture are so present in my life.

A large part of my culture, and most East Asian, Southeast Asian, and South Asian cultures, revolves around community and family. In the spring, we celebrate Tết with our loved ones. We welcome the new year, full of new beginnings and good fortune, with our community. The celebrations are a chance for everyone to become closer and for communities to get together. It’s a chance for us to appreciate our roots, pay respects to our ancestors, and share well wishes for the new year with our loved ones.

With May’s arrival and spring in full bloom, I reflect upon the community I am a part of at UConn Health, and the immense pride I feel for working in and with a health system that truly cares for everyone. I am so incredibly grateful for the opportunities I have received that allowed me to contribute to the health care system as a pharmacist. This spring, I reflect on my identity and my culture, and how I am so proud of my heritage because it has made me the person I am today.

This May, I reflect on my roots, how my loved ones, my ancestors, and my culture have led me to where I am now. To everyone who has Asian or Pacific Islander heritage, I am so proud to see us represented at UConn Health, where we work together to cultivate a community of care in our health care system.

And to everyone in general, I invite you to do the same and reflect on your roots, and how they have led you to where you are today. Happy Asian American Heritage Month!

Tiana Tran, Pharm.D., is a 2022 graduate of the UConn School of Pharmacy. She completed her pharmacy residency at UConn Health a year later, and started as a staff pharmacist at UConn Health last August.

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