March 19, 2024 12:42 am

ABOUT THE SITE

This is the Home Page of New Mexico State University’s Visual Journalism Department. The site exists to publish the work of students engaged in the appreciation, consideration and production of Visual Journalism. Students post their stories here, using Images and Text to explore the world through the means of Photojournalism, using Still Photography, Video and and Multimedia.

J412 is a storytelling-oriented class. It explores the world as it is, encourages truthfulness and ethical image-making and requires a respect for high craft skills. The core belief in this class is that photojournalism is done for others’ consumption and consideration, that the people photographed are the entire point of doing this genre of photography and that to do photojournalism effectively, the “shooter” must commit to total engagement with their subject matter.

The class is about who is outside the lens side of the camera not the person on the camera side.

The class focuses on doing extended projects. It concentrates on the idea of “depth” in reportage. It asks students to immerse themselves in a subject, visiting it, re-visiting it, becoming an “expert” on  it. The product of good documentary photography is a body of work that lets viewers know the truth of a situation, a place, a people.

Good documentary photography’s goal is truth, arrived at sincerely, via the effort of a “concerned photographer.”