The National Geographic Traveller
Photo Essay

This week I received word that a photo essay I had been working on for months was published. It is always a great feeling to see your work published after working on it for a long period of time. I always get a chuckle when people are surprised at how long it takes to get an article into print. It’s a lot of time and effort that pays off (literally and figuratively) in the end, especially when it’s in a magazine that you have a ton of respect for like the National Geographic Traveller.

Sometime in the spring of last year, I got an email from the photo editor from National Geographic Traveller (UK) asking if I had any interest in providing a photo story for their magazine. If you recall I had already worked for them on an assignment a year earlier in China. They liked my work and wanted to use more of it. I had recently returned from Mongolia and suggested the possibility of a story from there. I submitted a host of images and they then return with the core of a story. Now I needed to write the word that went with the images.

The opening double page spread. Pages 1 & 2

Photograph by Matt Brandon, Published in National Geographic Traveller, May 2019

The thing that stands out for me on this is how important captions are. So many photographers don’t feel that the captions are important or at least they think that their images should be able to stand on their own. Not so! Ok, maybe from an artistic perspective, I could see a photo standing on its own visual merit. But from a story perspective, nope. As a photographer, we should never fool ourselves to think that a viewer can gain the whole story from a single image. But what about a group of images., i.e. the “photo essay?” Surely a group of well-chosen images should be able to tell a story on their own. After all, “a photo is worth a thousand words,” right?

I am not going to be dogmatic here, but I believe most photo essays need more than just photos to communicate. Just as in this story of the eagle hunters.  The cold hard truth is that when telling a story your images can’t communicate the whole story without captions. As much as we’d like to think they can, there is just too much detail captured by the photo to explain what is happening. Life is complex and photos are as well and we need both good images and great words to accompany them. Once you have this combination you will have a story that truly communicates to the masses.

In other news, I just returned from India and where Piet Van den Eynde and I led another location portraiture workshop. While there Piet and I took the opportunity to record a series of videos that I am in the process of editing for a tutorial on Travel Portraitures. If you want the more current information on this series, when it will be released, any special sales etc.. sign up for my newsletter below. My subscribers will be the first to hear all the latest news.