Handout on the Photo Essay Introduction

RH104 Summer 2019 

Prof. Byttebier 

Handout on the photo essay introduction 

 

The photo essay introduction 

250-400 words 

 

  1. Make it personal … or not. Your introduction could be written in the first person, and give a personal account of the essay’s mission and perspective, or could be written in a matter-of-fact way, as if informing your reader of the topic from an objective point of view.  
  1. Either way … the intro should not just set the stage and help your reader clearly understand what the specific topic of the essay is (the what, where, and who), but also what your “angle” on this topic is (the why). If you look at the London Underground example, the intro makes clear that the photographer is interested in looking at the “democratic nature” of the Tube, meaning he is interested in showing the diversity of people on the metro as well as the diversity of their reactions to the camera. That’s an angle. Even the very brief introduction of “Gun Nation” makes clear the photo essay wants to look at the inherent tension surrounding the gun debate: the contradictions, hypocrisies, and convictions behind it. Or, finally, the photo essay on Slime makes clear in its introduction it wants to explore what makes slime so satisfactory. So: slime presented in its most alluring form.  
  1. You should feel free to quote or refer to sources in your intro (anything that is relevant to setting up your discussion), but if you do so, you need to hyperlink to the source (unless the interviewee was a friend). Hyperlinks are easy to insert in Spark and Google Slides.  
  1. If you use the first person in the intro, then you may use the first person to refer to yourself in the captions of pictures in which you appear. (E.g.: “Professor Byttebier and myself chat for the first time since arriving in London to pass the time as we wait for our Westminster Abbey tour. Students around us are so tired they don’t even notice.”) However, do not use the first person if you’re not in the picture (“I saw my friends…”). 
  1. Keep to the word limit; unlike some of the examples on the New York Times Lens blog, your intro should not run through the essay, but precede it.    

 

Examples: 

 

  1. From “The London Underground” pictures of Bob Mazzer: 

*Note that this introduction is written by a journalist reporting on Mazzer’s essay rather than 

by Mazzer himself. Since you’ll be writing your own introduction, you’ll either use the first 

person or refer directly to your topic in the third person (e.g., “this essay captures the very 

democratic nature of the …”). 

 

“London is a world city that mixes people from all corners of the globe. Every day, around four million of the city’s residents use the Tube. So it is understandable that someone would be compelled to try and capture some small fraction of the human diversity and strangeness to be found in its subterranean depths. Mazzer’s approach, accordingly, is democratic: if an individual or a small group catches his eye, his camera clicks and if the subject responds to his presence by posing, then all well and good. Similarly, Mazzer’s photographs capture the very democratic nature of the environment itself. For example, many of his pictures show the amusing serendipity of people utterly unlike one another sitting unnaturally close in a confined space. As German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans once wrote about the subway: ‘men and women incredibly close to each other’ yet, ‘we’ve all decided not to think of it as a sensual experience.’ 

 

Indeed, Mazzer’s most engaging images go beyond the surface and capture moments that are peculiar to underground train travel. Owing to the (uncomfortable) proximity, many people withdraw into themselves for the duration of their journey. The train ride becomes a time of repose, a period where nothing happens and Mazzer’s sharp eye catches passengers with their defenses down, ready to reveal the vulnerabilities that make us human. 

 

Besides the serious, Mazzer’s camera-ready aptitude also brings us moments of mirth and sociability: friends on a night out, a guitar player in a commanding position atop an escalator, a man on a ladder with his head effaced by the face of a clock he is fixing. A few are even nakedly opportunistic: drunks and vagabonds in various poses, two men fighting one another in their seats, the police arresting someone. But in sum, Mazzer’s pictures give us a lovely, daily document of the ups and downs of life—and all those little, introspective bits in between.” 

 

 

  1. From a NYTImes Lens photo essay on Slime: 

 

“One of the internet’s greatest features is satisfaction on demand. Dial up a video tagged ‘satisfying’ and conjure a mesmerizing sensation from your screen. Beautiful bars of soap cut into ribbons, fresh dough squeezed through a pasta maker, icing piped onto a cookie, a spider weaving its web — they scratch some kind of mental itch. The content seems to bypass the brain to access our bodies directly. And satisfaction incarnate is slime, that substance suspended at the boundaries between liquid and solid, and the onscreen and the physical. 

 

First popularized by Instagram users in Thailand and Indonesia, slime content has invaded the satisfaction internet and oozed into the American middle school. Slime is an art form, a community and an industry: sensory gratification tubbed and sold. From mundane household materials — laundry detergent, glitter, glue — springs an exotic material.”