Copyright©Donna DeCesare, 2001. Sacatepequez, Guatemala. Carlos Perez gets ready to go meet his homeboys.
Photojournalism and Documentary Post Print: Re-definitions and Possibilities
The historic photo essay of the mass media picture magazines and newspapers of the 20th century continued to dominate journalistic thinking about still image storytelling as photojournalism struggled to find its identity online. Now nearly two decades into the 21st century it is clear that the shift from analogue to pixels has implications beyond the change in delivery device or platform. New layered forms of non-linear storytelling make different kinds of photo essays possible. This intervention will explore some of the strategies that photojournalists and documentary photographers are pursing to remain relevant when everyone with a cellphone has become a photographer and how some of these same tools can be deployed by visual anthropologists.
Biography
Donna De Cesare is an author, educator, documentary photographer and recipient of documentary photography awards and grants. Some highlights are the Dorothea Lange Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke, the Mother Jones award for Social Documentary photography, a Fulbright fellowship , and several Open Society Foundations grants for independent photographic projects. Her book Unsettled Desasosiego: Children in a World of Gangs was published in 2013 and later that year she received one of international journalism’s highest honors–the Maria Moors Cabot Award for Journalism contributing to Understanding in Western Hemisphere. In 2016 she was named among Time Magazine’s women trailbrazers in photography of the past century. Ms. De Cesare teaches photography in underserved communities as well as to college students and professional photographers in the US and Latin America. She is a Master teacher for the Garcia Marquez New Journalism Project in Cartagena de las Indias Colombia and is a tenured Associate Professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin.
