So what makes a photographer decide to shoot one thing but not another? What leads the photographer to focus of the performer on stage but not the crowd? Or in the graphic case, the near dead bodies instead of the commotion of the emergency teams and rowdy neighborhood.
Take a look at part one of A Quiet Night's Menace.
One of the first things that come to mind when I watch this slide show is the potential to do many different things with this one incident. I'm not saying that this doesn't work, but I don't think I would have had the patience or discipline to do it.
Despite all the commotion going on around the intersection this photographer stood and shot from one angle. It's possible that the police didn't let them move and it's possible there was another photographer covering other aspects of the story, but someone still had to make the decision to stand and shoot there.
So why does it work? What are our other options, and why do we choose this one?
This could have been a pretty dramatic video piece, one that I think would have been way too graphic. Even just shooting from the same angle for the duration of the event would have been way too graphic for TV and offensive to many online readers in my opinion. Stills, however, dont provide the same sort of realism so I think the graphic content is more manageable. So, if you did want to turn this into a video package you would need to focus almost entirely on what was going on around the intersection as opposed to in the middle of it.
Another option could have been a gallery slide-show with a variety of different angles. Some with people crying, the two guys dead in the street, police running around, fire fighters, ect.; there is plenty going on here worth shooting.
So why not? I tried to imagine this story shot in that way with the same audio. I don't think that would work at all. There is a certain level of commosion that comes with 991 recording and police transmissions. Regardless of content, 991 recordings always put people on edge, audio slide-shows don't. If you wanted to do this story that way I think a better option would be getting sound bites from people after you were done shooting and after things had time to settle down. At that point the story is completely different, especially depending on what your sources say.
So what of the product we have?
Having the presence of mind to get out the audio record was just as important as deciding not move around and shoot a variety of angles. I really don't the images would have worked without an audio track like this and the audio track wouldn't work with any other images. The two have to work together. Both are chaotic, both are graphic, both tell the story.
This is definitely a very unique piece and I think it is important to recognize all the decision that go into its creation. If the photographer had decided to get much closer this could have been very graphic and/or they could have been injured. If they hadn't recorded any audio this show would have been really boring. If they had of decided to make a traditional show they would have had to tell the story as they interpreted it.
Whether the decision was made prior to the shoot or not is irrelevant, the point is the photographer took a big risk in making this piece and I think it clearly paid off. As it is the story seems to tell itself, and that to me is what it is all about.
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