Visual Essays

This week we have focused on visual composition, specifically the visual essay. According to Wikipedia, a visual essay is a set or series of photographs that are intended to tell a story or evoke a series of emotions in the viewer. A photo essay will often address a certain issue or attempt to capture the character of a place, event, or process. A photo essay can be comprised solely of photos, it can be a series of photos accompanied by text captions or notes, or it can be a long text based essay accompanied by photos to help convey the point of the essay. Photo essays do not necessarily have to be arranged so that they must be viewed in a particular order. They can be arranged so that their meaning is clear in any order, or they can be arranged so that they must be viewed in an order to present the intended point most effectively.
It is important to recognize that all photo essays are collections of photos, but not all collections of photos are photo essays. For example, a slide show showing pictures of a war torn country would be an example of a photo essay meant to evoke emotions in the viewers and might not need to be viewed in a particular order to get its point across. A photo essay meant to describe a process like how to play baseball would be an example of a photo essay telling a story, and would probably need to be viewed in some order to make sense to its viewers.
In class we were supposed to come up with our own photo essay. We were split into groups of four and given the opportunity to choose our own topics. My group decided to make a photo essay of a process with mild humor. We picked ultimate Frisbee, a sport similar to football, as our topic. We decided that we wanted to show that the sport is easy to learn, and then show some photos of a game in progress. Since there were only four group members, one of which had to take the pictures, it was somewhat difficult to depict an actual game, but we did it as best we could. Before we actually took the pictures we brainstormed on what images that we needed to include in our essay. Then we went out and took the pictures. Finally we uploaded the photos onto Flickr, arranged them, and added captions.
Overall, think that visual essays are superior to essays comprised solely of text since they contain images. I have already discussed they differences, advantages, and disadvantages of images and text in previous posts.