Assignment 3

The Ekphrastic Photo Essay project is designed to challenge your brain in a much different way. This Photo Essay is a creative endeavor, one that asks you to engage the artistic and visual parts of your brain.

The project requires very little writing, relying instead on your ability to convey a message—a science fiction story of your choosing, in this case—primarily through photographs that you take for this express purpose. Your inspiration will be of course “Klara and the Sun,” Part 1.

You will supplement your photographs with brief writings, mostly in the form of captions describing each photo. The photographs, and the progression of events they convey, along with the supplemental text provided by your captions, should represent a clear and interesting science fiction story to your readers.

This project will proceed along the following steps:

Identify a suitable topic for your essay. This should be something that you can photograph during the first week of this assignment. Your goal will be to use primarily photographs to convey to your readers something you find interesting about your topic.

This might be the story of your astronaut dog’s day spent in outer space, for example. In this case, your story would cover the full arc of the story, from your dog waking up at home, to finding out the news that he/she gets to go to outer space, to the events of the space-day, to the ride home, and then full-circle back to bed.

Take photos of your topic. This must be started and finished within the scope of the project. You may not use photos you have taken before the start of this project, and you may not use photos taken by someone else. The only exception to this rule is if a historical photo is required to establish context or progress.

Aim to take photos that are high quality, well-shot, and well-edited. For this, you will need a digital camera and basic photo-editing software. Any modern smartphone will do, though I recommend you use a DSLR if you have one.

Well-told stories will probably require anywhere from 20-50 photos. In order to get that many “keepers” you should plan to shoot many more, perhaps as many as 100-200 photos to ensure you end up with enough usable images.

Organize, edit, and lay out your photos in a Word document in such a way that they convey the story you wish. The photos should be the stars of the show, not the text. Format your document so that the photos are as large and as clear as possible.

Add captions to each photograph to help the reader understand why you have included that photo. What are we looking at? Why are we looking at this? How do you think this advances the science fiction story you are trying to convey? The photo itself should be worth “1000 words,” but a little supplemental text can go a long way toward setting the context or explaining the content of an image.