For this exercise I have to watch an interview with Jon Levy, founder of Foto8 and note down my reactions to his comments.
Jon Levy was the founder of Foto8, a website that launched in 1998, followed by a magazine that was published between 2001 and 2012.
In the interview, Levy explains to Jose Navarro the ethos behind the magazine and how he selected the work that featured in it. The first point he made was that the magazine was primarily about story-telling and the medium used to tell the stories was photography, rather than being a magazine about photography. He then went on to clarify that the stories that the magazine was interested in were factual rather than fictional.
Perhaps the most significant part of the interview was when Levy was talking about intention. Put simply, in Levy’s view, what made a project photojournalism or documentary was that the work must have been made with an intention to tell a particularly story from the start. Although Levy asknowledged that the intention behind a work was sometimes unquantifiable, for him, the difference between documentary or photojournalism and art photography was that for the former were produced with an intention in mind whereas he felt that with art photography the intention was sometimes applied after the work was produced.
Returning to the theme of story-telling, Levy explained that there was no hierarchy of story-telling stories that work did not just have to be grave or pressing to be significant and that ‘quieter’ works connected with readers and viewers just as well. Levy went on to talk about the term vernacular photography and how photojournalism has traditionally been seen as a Western porcess of going to places around the world and photographing stories as an outsider. He then went on to talk about the ability of local photographers to submit their work to the magazine, presumably because of the advance of digital photography, and thereby give a different perspective could only be a good thing.
I think the key take-outs from this interview were the importance of intention, the idea of creating work to illustrate a story rather than trying to create a story from a set of images; and the idea that documentary photography does not always have to be about large scale or pressing issues, the ability to tell personal and local stories in a visually compelling way is equally important.
Bibliography
Jon Levy on Intent (2011) Directed by Arts, O.C. of the. At: https://vimeo.com/18504946 (Accessed 04/11/2020).
Documentary, Fact & Fiction 