Telling the Story Through Pictures
New Visual Storytelling helps writers and photographers think with their eyes
By
Colleen Fischer
OF THE SLUG! STAFF
A wounded bald eagle. Women riding llamas. A line of ballerinas.
Just hours after editors at the San Francisco Chronicle considered these and other images for the front page of the next day's newspaper, Kathleen Hennessy presents them to her Visual Storytelling class.
"Now you guys get to be editors," she says, arranging the students into groups of five and six and challenging them to choose photographs for the paper's section fronts.
Bickering over which pictures to select, and how much room each should get, the students shuffle the photographs. Occasional peals of laughter break out.
"Whoever shot this should be shot," one student jokes, looking at a dull portrait of two musicians.
Visual Storytelling, a new addition to the San Francisco State Journalism Department course offerings, is designed to bridge the gap between text and visuals in the curriculum. Each Wednesday night, 27 students meet to discuss the mysteries of image placement with Hennessy, a picture editor at the Chronicle for more than 15 years.
"Photographs are the first thing that the reader sees," she says in an interview. "Sometimes it's the only thing they look at."
Before the class existed, there was a "hole" in journalism students' education, says photojournalism professor Ken Kobre. He'd been trying for 10 years to get the department to offer the course so students could get "an appreciation for the other world - how pictures and type communicate."
Many other schools have a similar kind of course, often called "Visual Communications," Kobre says, and in some journalism programs the course is required. He hopes Visual Storytelling will become a required course at San Francisco State.
"People think that because they have eyes and they can see, they can choose a picture, crop it, and write about it," he says. "People have a lot to learn about picture selection."
Hennessy also addresses the importance of putting the right words with the right pictures. During a recent class session, students tried their hands at writing captions.
"There was quite a brouhaha when one paper decided to make the rule 'three mistakes in a caption and you're fired,' " Hennessy told her students. "That's how serious some people are about captions."
Hennessy encourages students to help one another and come up with their own answers. She and the students banter back and forth, creating more of a conversation than a lecture.
"They're very enthusiastic," she says.
Robert Hernandez, a 23-year-old journalism major, says the course teaches him how to crop pictures, a skill he gets to use in his job as an online editor for the San Francisco Examiner.
Students in class, he notes, often joke that photographers don't know how to write, and writers don't know anything about pictures.
"My girlfriend's a photographer, so I know her pain," he says.
The class is designed for writing students, but about two-thirds of the students are photojournalism majors, Hennessy says.
Photojournalism students say the class teaches them how to edit pictures, a skill other classes don't emphasize.
Valentin Mendoza, a 24-year-old photojournalism major, complains that the three-hour class is long, but Hennessy's experience and teaching style make her "a great resource."
"I think it's an important class," he says.
On the night she has her students play editors, Hennessy observes the selection process with an amused smile.
"You're gonna die when you see the paper tomorrow," she says.
Eventually, all the groups reject a picture of the pathetic-looking bald eagle, preferring images of the ballerinas, a demonstration and the women on llamaback. They're so curious to know what the Chronicle is going to run that they persuade Hennessy to call the newspaper and find out.
"They ran the bald eagle picture!" she says, after calling a colleague on a student's cell phone.
Groans.
In an interview later, Hennessy admits that she agreed with the students - the photo of the homely bald eagle didn't belong on the front page. But, she says, the experience taught the students a fundamental lesson: there is no right answer when it comes to picture editing.
And, as it turned out, the bald eagle photo got a great response from readers. "As editors, we have to sometimes listen to what readers have to say. This isn't just about what's newsworthy. People like to see something that's different or unusual."
