Back in the spring, Layton Payne wrote a blog entry declaring that Visual Storytelling [Is] Now Mainstream. The blogger was specifically referring to visual storytelling in the form of graphic novels, which are undergoing significant growth. But if visual storytelling in graphic novels is growing, it is also growing in numerous other manifestations and venues. Here’s a partial sampling from the last several months; look for Part 2 of this post on Oct. 10:
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- Online and multimedia storytelling from the 2010 Pulitzer Prize winners, which the site 10,000 Words says, “show that the traditional print stories can be married with multimedia and online projects to create a more dynamic and enticing story package.”
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Photography of Ryan Schude: “Focusing around a conceptual and narrative framework, Ryan blends a fine art background with a more produced look to create multiple stories within each photo,” says gismullr (Twitter handle).- An Atmosphere Excavated by John Becker: “Architecture graduate John Becker’s final project involved creating the future headquarters of a fictional company that sells bottled water harvested from dew. The Columbia University School of Architecture graduate also constructed an invented history of the brand, but based the story on the real-life practice of collecting water in “dew ponds” and set the story in a real location in southern England.”
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- Dialoogle (pictured above) is creative tool to kick-start, renew, diversify and qualify communication in dialogues and group conversations. Dialoogling makes use of a series of picture cards with motives created to stimulate associations, inspire creativity, and facilitate versatile linguistic formulation of feelings, perceptions and ideas.
- Renee Byer: Pulitzer Prize Winning Photojournalist, on the story telling power of photography. Byer isn’t the world’s most accomplished presenter — she mostly reads her notes, and the video is subtitled, perhaps because Byer speaks quickly — but about four minutes in, her presentation gives way to simply showing samples of her photographs and giving only the titles so that viewers can explore the emotions the images evoke for them.
Imaginative Landscape Pictorials: Michael Vincent Manalo’s Wondrous ‘Tales from the Story Teller’ “feature beautiful photographs, some of which have been digitally manipulated to create a unique image,” says the site TrendHunter. “The images feature people with their backs to the camera, staring into their various landscapes.” (sample at left)- Voices of Haiti is a photo essay by Jeremy Cowart. who says:
After the 7.0 earthquake rocked Haiti on January 12th of this year, I was deeply moved as most of you were. For days I watched as the television flashed images of gloom and doom… dead bodies, crumbled buildings… It just felt like a heartless display of numbers and statistics. “How were the people feeling?” I wondered. I was tired of hearing endless reports from strangers that just arrived to this devastated nation. So I decided to go to Port-Au-Prince myself and ask them directly. My question was simply “What do you have to say about all this?” This photo essay reveals the many answers to that question.
- Florian de Visser’s paper art storytelling. de Visser says his “projects are storytelling and always contextual, at any scale level. I like to look at the world with eyes wide open, to give the ordinary a twist and make it extraordinary. I try to trigger people’s imagination of their environment. Fiction and reality can never be seen separately.”