If you thought photojournalism is the "easy way out" of your weekly deadline, think again.

"Anonymous Suicide" was featured on the front page of The
Warrior Ledger's first issue at the beginning of the school year.

A student at a neighboring junior high school shot himself in full view of dozens of his classmates on the way home from school. A year later, your Editor-in-Chief writes a font-page story reflecting on this incident, highlighting the rising numbers in teen suicides and the resources available to students struggling with suicidal thoughts.

How do you illustrate this story when depicting students is obviously out of the question? How do you even picture an issue as incorporeal and yet all-encompassing as depression without becoming guilty of tastelessness or cliche?

That was my staff's challenge at the beginning of last school year when we took on the issue of rising teen suicide rates and struggled to figure out a way to visualize this issue in a news photograph. The result is the photo illustration above.

It may not be perfectly lit, maybe even tap into cliche and yet it's the process of coming up with the idea and ultimately the execution of this photo that becomes my go-to story for numerous journalism students approaching me with the question, "Can I just take pictures? It's so much easier than writing every week."

Those students have not been part of photojournalism yet. They are new to the idea that photos are more than a simple click, more than a photo shot on a crappy phone camera. They don't know how the making of this photo not only depending on lots of ideas that were proposed and immediately thrown out before an initial concept materialized. They weren't there to do the run-around to figure out which teacher would not get busted for violating fire codes for lighting twenty-odd candles in their classroom. They didn't make a Walmart run to buy aforementioned candles. They didn't burn their fingers in the making of this photo.

They only see payoff, in form of deadline grades, for what they see as basically new work at all. This is where this story of the "production process" of a photo illustration and Dave Seibert's session on photo journalism comes in relevant and useful.

A lot of my students don't understand all the considerations and trial and error involved in effective photo journalism. They may never have hear of the Rule of Thirds or what makes a good photo. That even your fanciest camera will yield meaninglessness if you don't factor in emotion along with light and composition. That they need to be able to explain what they felt while taking the photo they are submitting for print.

Dave has definitely given this struggling baby journalism teacher a great foundation of knowledge, and even greater examples, to drive the point home that photojournalism is far from a copout of your deadline, but that photographers, just like the rest of the staff need to do the legwork and go through numerous trials and errors on their way to printable deadlines.

Thanks, Dave, for arming with a new understanding of how to convey this very important lesson to my shutter-happy students.

Stephanie Floch
Taylorsville High School
Taylorsville, Utah