At the 2015 Foundry Photojournalism Workshop, eight renowned instructors spoke with PhotoWings about the art and importance of visual storytelling. With a wealth of experience between them, they discuss what it means to them, how they do it, and what they are able to accomplish with it.



As we feature a small sliver of this work throughout the video, we encourage you to explore the accompanying image gallery to learn more about these journalists, their images and the stories they represent.

Featuring:

Kael Alford, Thorne Anderson, Andrea Bruce, James Whitlow Delano, Edward Echwalu, Tewfic El-Sawy, Ron Haviv, Henrik Kastenskov, and John Stanmeyer

Tewfic: Storytelling is such an important element in, uh, visual arts now and people are hungry for stories. People have been hungry for stories since cavemen.

Ron: If you're able to craft a good story that can resonate with an audience and make your audience think, that's such a powerful, powerful tool. And I think that when it's done well, and people see it across the world and they start to think a little bit differently or learn a little bit about the world. This is the beauty of photography. It's the beauty of visual storytelling. It's the beauty of imagery where people will remember photographs and remember these moments and take them with them.

Kael: Strong storytelling gives your viewers a little package they can take away with them. The pictures have to be unique enough. There has to be enough life and activity or love or emotion in them.

James: It's about creating empathy. Connect people who wouldn't consider the fate and the destiny of other people or another place. That to me is the Holy Grail.

Henrik: In a time where this disaster fatigue we're fed up with living with all of these tragedies all over. The ability to tell strong and compelling stories is also the ability to get an audience.

Thorne: What does a story look like? How many images is a story? What kinds of pictures do you see in a story? You can tell a story through a single character. You can choose one person who is a representative of a larger idea and immerse yourself intimately in that person's life. In the process of doing so you're going to learn thing about the larger subject matter. You can choose a place or an event and document everything that happens in that place - or everything that happens through an event. Then you can leverage the power of sequencing to tell more complex stories than you can tell with any individual picture.

Kael: Try to come up with a working title. The title can change but if you come up with a title it's like a concept to hang your photography on. It helps give you focus. You know, it's overwhelming when you're in a new place. You photograph here and there and this over there draws your attention and you're trying to follow the light. But it helps for me to keep like a mantra in my mind like this story is about . . .

John: Curiosity is essential to a story. Listening is essential to a story. Actually I'm interested in silence, and understanding silence in order to understand all the noise to tell the story.

Andrea: You spend time to find the pictures that don't automatically creep into your mind when you think of something. When you think of a family eating dinner you can automatically visualize a scene but when I go to a situation or when I have a student go to a situation I want them to shoot something completely different than the thing that they already visualized.

Thorne: Striving for intimacy is one of the greatest things that you can do as a photographer. So when I say to extract the extraordinary from the ordinary all I'm really talking about is looking inside of another person's life and finding one simple moment that means something larger than itself.

John: It's expression. It's not just the expression of the world around us; it's the expression of how we see it. Every individual lives this life and experiences life in their own expression and in their own being and purpose.

Thorne: The reactions of the people around your character are as important as the character's expressions themselves and this is what we do as photojournalists. We examine people and how they interact with each other and interaction is where you get storytelling.

Edward: I try to use my emotions to inject them into my project. It can be totally biased which is also fine as well. Sometimes extremely biased emotions help you dig deeper into the story, help you tell it with conviction.

John: So what's the essential of storytelling? Well to not look at it as just a box. It's not a box; it's a whole story. It's a universe. The most important thing is everything and maybe nothing at all other than curiosity.

Maggie: Spend the time and have the patience and don't be in such a rush because every day is a day lived and if you want an experience and the picture is evidence of it, if you want a rich life and the picture is evidence of it, if you want to learn lessons from people who are wiser than you, the picture is evidence of it.

Ron: Once we let our work go, once it interacts with the audience, we as photographers have no idea what the impact can be. And I can tell you having done this for so many years that there is impact. The work doesn't just disappear; it touches people. That's one of the reasons why I'm still a photographer, why I'm still a visual storyteller. What an amazing privilege to be able to see the world, tell the world this is how I see things. This is what I've discovered. You can learn from this. Expand your horizon and hopefully make the world a better place by what you've learned here with this work.