Editor’s Corner
June 5, 2009
Windows on Multimedia
By
Constance Hale
The dictionary defines multimedia as a technique that combines sound, video, and text to express ideas. But it doesn’t offer a definition for multimedia narrative journalism. Two pieces recently crossed our desks that define the new form by example.
The first is our Notable Narrative, “Killer Blue: Baptized by Fire,” which recounts the combat tour of a platoon of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment’s 3rd Squadron. Based in Fort Hood, Texas, the 30 men in the unit shared an outpost with an Iraqi army platoon at the intersection of two of the most dangerous roads in Mosul, an urban stronghold of al-Qaida. Produced by the Associated Press, the piece combines still photography, video, an innovative soundtrack, and spare text.
That qualifies it as multimedia. But what qualifies it as multimedia narrative journalism?
For starters, it’s a drama in four acts, though the artful editing defies simplistic notions of “beginning-middle-end” by weaving back and forth in time, foreshadowing, and juxtaposing unlike images without ever blurring the deadly sequence of events. Each act has a clear theme: camaraderie, the stress of battle, loss, and the struggle to move on.
The journalists wisely zoom in on seven characters, developing them through images and interviews. The black-and-white portraits of the soldiers, the color shots of wives collapsing in pain at the playing of “Taps” and exploding in joy at the homecoming—as well as camera work that captures the psychic confusion one soldier experiences after his return—all capture emotional turmoil without playing for effect.
“Windows on Iraq: Images and Context” takes a different tack. Like “Killer Blue,” which followed up on a 2008 video essay by AP photographers Evan Vucci and Maya Alleruzzo, “Windows on Iraq” started when Kael Alford, a freelance photojournalist, was on assignment in Iraq in 2003 and 2004.
But unlike the AP package—which focused on Americans, used the reportorial third person, and eschewed narration—“Windows on Iraq” features Alford as a first-person narrator with a double purpose: to show us an Iraq we may not see in the news and to reflect on what happens when journalists, policymakers, and the public don’t get the full picture of war. The photos of Baghdad before and after the 2003 bombing are startling in their poetry, and shots from a village in Anbar—green fields and fruit orchards, boys swimming in the Euphrates, a feast in a sheik’s walled garden—are indeed a departure from familiar images of car bombings, hospital emergency rooms, looters, and anguished mothers.
But sometimes Alford’s two purposes seem at odds. In one powerful series of photos we see women bathing a dead naked girl, and Alford recounts the women telling her, “Show this to the Americans. Show them what war looks like.” Then we learn that the shrapnel bits that killed the girl are so small the wounds hardly show. But a moment of polemic interpretation intrudes upon these acute observations when Alford ruminates about feeling the weight of responsibility when our country chooses to go to war.
The competing-voices quality of the piece may be explained by its genesis in a series of conversations on “Islam and Muslim Communities in Context” at Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern studies. [Alford is a 2009 Nieman Fellow; her partner Thorne Anderson is on the Digest staff, but did not participate in discussions of this piece.] Ultimately, though, “Windows on Iraq” is not just a conversation among “academics, journalists, and Muslim community members,” but also a photojournalist’s conversation with herself.