Photo journals

In this unit we are asking you to create photojournals, but what is a photojournal?

Photojournals are an evolution from photojournalism. According to wikipedia “Photojournalism is a particular form of journalism (the collecting, editing, and presenting of news material for publication or broadcast) that employs images in order to tell a news story. It is now usually understood to refer only to still images, but in some cases the term also refers to video used in broadcast journalism.”

So, we are asking you become a journalist of a news story (the coronavirus) but what we are asking you to do is to tell YOUR STORY, using your perspective on the topic. We are asking you to report on how you and your family lived through the coronavirus: what did you do, how did you feel, etc..

I am going to share with you some personal photojournals, so you get a better idea.

One photographer that does photojournals really well is Philip Toledano  “In the last five years, British photographer Philip Toledano has turned the lens on his life and his family. ”

With Days With My Father, he dealt with his mother’s passing and the impact the loss had on his father, who suffered from dementia. See here what he wrote, and here the pictures he took:

In The Reluctant Father, he studied how the birth of his daughter, dreaded at first, changed his life for the better.”

In his latest book, When I Was Six, Toledano goes back in time, to the moment when his sister Claudia died in a fire. He was just 6, then, and, to this day, he doesn’t remember how he coped with the unexpected loss. “I don’t have any memories of my life after she died, except for this kind of peculiar fascination with space travel and astronomy,” Toledano tells TIME. “I think it was a way of being somewhere else, far from what had happened.” After the death of his parents, Toledano found a box of Claudia’s things that his mother had kept. “Clothes, toys, health records, notes she wrote,” he says. “But also, everything to do with her death. It was a museum of sorts. But it was also a second chance; a chance to know my sister; to understand the pain my parents carried, and the strength it took not to bury me along with my sister.” – TIME writes.

Here is what he wrote, here the pictures he took.

This last example is good for this project because as you can see these pictures are metaphors. Like in poetry. See why this unit is an IDU with poetry?

So, after seeing these examples you should get a better idea of what we are trying to do. Take pictures of your every day to tell us how you are feeling through these uncertain times. And when you are doing that also think that another 140 grade 8 students are doing the same, so how can you make your photos unique? How can you make sure they reflect only your perspective?