A photo essay is a set or series of photographs used to tell a story or evoke an emotion in the viewer. Photo essays are sometimes made up of many photographs and text captions, or just the phototgraphs themselves, leaving the interpretation in the hands of the viewer. "All photo essays are collections of photographs, but not all collections of photographs are photo essays." Your vacation photos probably don't count.
Sometimes photo essays appear in an article or publication -- often taking up multiple pages. They might appear in a book or on a web site. Sometimes they'll appear as a single montage of photographs.
Photo essays can be incredibly powerful. By combining many different photographs focused in some way on one topic, the viewer can get a feel for the big picture of an event.
- “Think about the photo before and after, never during. The secret is to take your time. You mustn't go too fast. The subject must forget about you. Then, however, you must be very quick.” -- Henri Cartier-Bresson
- “I take a lot of photos of people.” -- Heath Ledger
- “In France we have a law which doesn't allow the press to publish a photo that you didn't approve. It lets the paparazzi take the picture, but if they publish this picture, you have the choice to sue the newspaper. So me, I always sued them.” -- Audrey Tautou
- "One picture is worth a thousand words, but that's still not even a fraction of the story." -- Anthony Eosine Sposato
4 comments:
From a mathematical perspective, is one a "set?" I seem to recall that it can be.
Yep. A mathematic set can contain one item, or even, in the case of the empty set, no items at all.
I see an opportunity where Cage and Rauschenberg have left a space unoccupied.
And sometimes one picture really is worth 1,000 words. I've always been a big Cartier-Bresson fan.
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