What is a Photo Essay?
A photo essay is one in which photographs tell the story. The photographs might literally tell a chronological story, or they might simply suggest an idea. They may even argue a position.
Often photo essays are presented with no text at all, but text may be included in the form of descriptions of the photographs or introductions to the collection. A photo essay might also be written with a great deal of text in the form of its own narrative in which photographs are embedded throughout to illustrate the narrative.
An essay about graffiti, for example, might include photographs like these of sidewalk art.
Or liquid paper on bricks.
Some excellent places to view photo essays in which the photographs tell the whole story include the following:
Mother Jones Photo Essays
LENS of the New York Times features blog essays with photo slide shows.
And here's a photo essay with text from The Denver Post.
To create a photo essay, you'll need photos and text that go hand in hand. You'll need to compose both. Pick your topic. Maybe do a free write or a preliminary draft of an essay to think through what you want to say. Take your camera out searching for pictures. Load the pictures onto your computer. And then, if you want to write your photo essay on a blog like this, you can either upload them directly into your blog post, or you can upload them first to a photo sharing site like Flickr (as I have done) and embed them into the blog from there.
Write your essay, and arrange the photographs into the essay in ways that complement the text. Or, as an alternative, arrange the photographs to tell their story first and write text to go along with each photograph.
That's it.
