Just expanding on a comment in class and sharing some freakin' amazing images. I commented how I saw journalism in terms of ethnography when done with depth. I know that may have been puzzling, as a 500-word article from the Associated Press on a statement by the White House, of a 30-second report on CNN is far from a study of culture.
But that's not all that journalism does. By contrast, much of my career has centered around long-term project work examining subcultures both from inside the culture and out -- ie 10 years on rodeo cowboys and the mostly mythical culture they constantly invent, to seven years with Latin pentecostals and how they are upending the dominant cultures where they operate.
I was simply amazed by the reading and how the concerns and goals coincide with that kind of long-form work -- from the need to define a field, to examining carefully your own part in the culture, to having to figure out when to stop. I might have to rip off Boyd's list for my long-form photo essay course at CU.
Here are a few of the examples I picked up in my youth that have influenced my whole career since. Sorry they are mostly images out of the context of the work as a whole, including text:
Bruce Davidson's immersive photo essay on a Brooklyn street gang, 1959
Danny Lyon's immersive photo essay on a Chicago biker gang, 1967
Mary Ellen Mark's immersive essay on life in a maximum-security mental ward, 1975
An aside, anyway…
K
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