Can Medium Resurrect the Photo Essay?

If it wants to.

So I’m a bit of a photo nerd. Not someone who obsesses over cameras, but someone who likes to see the news. After learning about the world this way for much of my childhood, I even went and became a photographer. I had a blast. Then I started an iPad magazine of, yes, narrative photo essays. There’s more after that, but suffice to say, photography is dear to me. I breathe it. I love it. I live it. And because of this, I’m crazy for Medium.

Wait, what? Yes, really.

Last month I published a photo essay here. It was simple to create, looked great, and was read by a lot of people. But of vastly greater importance, Medium delivered this to a guy—me—with almost no social media presence. The experience was transformative, and it’s proved an inspiring story with my photographer friends. I’ve taken to saying things like “Medium can change the game for visual storytelling”—words I don’t utter lightly.

I started thinking so much about photography on Medium that, over the past couple weeks, I’ve excitedly tapped out three drafts of a manifesto on the future of the craft. But two nights ago, just before hitting the publish button, I decided to run an experiment. I created a collection on Medium called Stories Worth Seeing, which I intended to fill with the best photo stories I could find.

I figured it’d be good to survey the scene before saying anything rash. And then something funny happened. Besides my own, in four hours of searching I couldn’t find a single photo story. Here’s the best platform I know for publishing them, and I appear to be the only photographer using it. I put my manifesto on ice. So far as I can tell, when it comes to the photo essay, I’m not sure Medium is interested. I’d like to argue it should be.

When the smart people aren’t in the room for 40 years, disaster

Life Magazine, known widely for its photo stories, was a weekly read for over 13 million Americans in the 1960s. Add in its competitors, and the number zooms past 25 million. They’re all long dead, and a few years back I hunted down a former managing editor of Look Magazine (peak circulation 7.75 million). To add insult to injury, he told me from a nursing home bed that, today, people couldn’t care less about photo stories. Dead format, he said.

I’ve spent much of the past four years trying to prove him wrong, a quest guided, simply enough, by my experience watching young friends consume the news. What happened to the photo story? Your average pundit will describe a changed media landscape, disrupted business models, or just chuckle and say “Television.” Not so fast. A better answer is this: The public doesn’t consume photo stories because, for the last 40 years, nobody has improved the experience of consuming photo stories. No one with influence has asked the simple question: What do readers need?

The answer isn’t difficult, so I’ll just spit it out: Readers need a consistent reading environment. Consistent navigation, consistent quality, and a consistent way to engage. No surprise, this describes all the most popular content destinations on the web, from Google News to Facebook to Reddit. It also describes Medium.

As these things go though, I see photo stories all the time. All I had to do was scour the web for photographers I like, learn how to navigate their portfolios, all of which look and function differently, and then create an elaborate system of bookmarks and alerts to keep up with it all. Or in other words, to experience photo stories today resembles blog reading circa 1998.

Snow Fall was a red herring

I’m not sure photo people understand the problem. These are folks who responded to Snow Fall by building their own multimedia tools, of which there are now a dozen. It makes me want to scream at these people, “Multimedia gizmos doth not a returning reader make!” But I doubt they’re listening.

If I was a betting man, I’d wager the Medium team saw Snow Fall and studied its trajectory through the social web. Screw the gadgets, I imagine them thinking—how did so many people learn about the story? And where did they click when they were done? And when did they next read a New York Times article? I’d also wager that Medium’s growth is driven by its ability to answer these questions for its own stories. And while they might not have intended it, Medium is uniquely positioned to do the same thing for visual storytelling.

Photography’s not-so-dirty, maybe even admirable secret

If there’s a persistent truth in photography, it’s one that outsiders aren’t typically aware of: Photographers care most about telling stories. But by 2010, when I started the iPad magazine I mentioned (we called it Once Magazine, and it lasted 10 glorious issues) the publishing establishment was in frantic retreat. Even the big boys of the industry were buying dramatically fewer stories—and paying less for each, when they paid at all.

Many of the photographers we worked with at Once had adopted a new strategy: They had transitioned into careers as corporate and commercial photographers, punctuated by the occasional wedding. There were downsides. In place of publishing politically relevant stories for a wide audience, they were being paid to serve the narrow interests of clients. Instead of pitching stories to editors, they were selling themselves to advertising and art buyers.

Yet there was a distinct silver lining: these shooters were reinvesting their earnings into ambitious and risky personal projects.

In fact, a photographer’s visual brand has come to be defined, for most of the best shooters, by self-assigned stories. These are the pieces we published at the magazine and, by and large, they remain ripe for publishing.

Why photographers will bite

I want to point out two trends that are gaining traction with photographers. Medium embodies both.

The first is that photographers are increasingly seeking wide distribution for their stories. Chalk it up to the adoption of content marketing, a re-embrace of journalistic idealism, or the simple fact that it’s possible, but photographers increasingly recognize that public eyeballs are essential to an independent career. We see this in the self-publishing movement, and, most explicitly, in the professional community’s adoption of Instagram.

Second, corporate and commercial photography buyers increasingly look to social media to find photographers. Or further still, they look for photographers with the proven ability to tell strong—and popular—stories. Until recently, these people demanded a portfolio on a custom URL; today, they look for social traction.

Medium plays into these trends like no other platform. Writers here have complained plenty about various social media restrictions; for photographers, they’re a godsend. This is a place to impress clients; it’s designed to put maximum eyeballs on the best stories; and as a bonus for idealists, Medium serves the original itch of journalism: it delivers stories to an engaged public audience. Best of all, one need not be a famous author to pull it off.

If you’re a photographer and you’re not convinced, consider this: Medium’s business model is driven by its ability to surface the highest quality stories, a challenge it’s tackling not just with algorithms, but with investments in real human editors and original, paid stories. If that doesn’t warm your heart, I’m not sure what will.

What Medium needs to attract photography’s best

There are a few (relatively) simple changes Medium could make to attract more photographers. They include support for full-width images (like here), an option for large-text captions, and support for smaller images, potentially as diptychs and triptychs. There are also some subtle visual effect that might enhance a photo-heavy reading experience.

More than any of this though, Medium needs photographers to begin experimenting. When I was working on Once, I estimated that there are about 5,000 photographers in the world with the drive, skills, and access necessary to tell compelling, policy-affecting visual stories. They’re followed by millions of fans, many of whom, like me, aspire to tell stories as powerful as theirs. Yet for myriad reasons, 90% of the stories they produce are effectively invisible to the public. If you, like me, are a fan of humanity, this is a problem. Medium can change this.

As a parting thought, I’d be remiss to leave the impression that “Medium can save photography.” Photography doesn’t need saving, and it’s not a startup’s role to dole out charity. Instead, if you’re a photographer, this place should give you hope. Medium represents the clearest means I know for photographers to save themselves. I just hope the team is interested.