best topic for pictorial essay

18 Immersive Photo Essay Examples & Tips

By Tata Rossi 13 days ago, Professional photography

A photo essay tells a story or evokes emotion through a series of photographs. The essays allow you to be creative and fully explore an idea. Such essays exist in a variety of forms – from photos only to images with brief comments or written essays accompanied by shots. Choose a photo essay example that you can easily do based on your professional level and the equipment you use.

1. Protests

• View the “Resistance” photo essay by David Moore .

A great idea for photo essays for students is to shoot the protest to show its power. You can capture people with signs and banners to demonstrate what they are standing for. Besides, you can learn how to capture moving subjects. Use the best example of photo essay and don’t forget about angles, composition, and framing.

To create a photo essay , go up to the front and photograph the leader of the protesters walking forward. After that, go back to the end of the group to take pictures of families joining the protest. As a result, you will gain experience shooting big groups of people in motion.

2. Transformation

• View the “A Self-Portrait Every Day” photo essay by Noah Kalina .

This idea is all about capturing the way a person changes. You may take photos of a pregnant woman and then capture the same model with a child. By documenting the development of the child for several years, you can tell a great story in the form of a photo essay.

However, you can also create a photo essay about the transformation of different objects. For instance, you can create a time-lapse series to capture the history of a renovated building. While you will have to take a lot of similar photos to bring this idea to life, it will allow you to achieve an impressive result.

3. Local Event

• View the “Monday Marathon” photo essay by Quinn G. Perini .

Whether you are a resident of a large city or a small town, you can find an opportunity to visit a local event, like a marathon or a festival. This is a nice chance to follow modern photography trends and bring photo essay ideas to life.

You can capture the before-and-after stages of the event. Arrive earlier and take pictures of the preparation activities, then shoot the actual event starting with the official beginning.

Keep photographing even when the event is over and capture the cleaning up and disassembling processes.

4. Photowalk

• View the “Empty Campus” photo essay by Elise Trissel .

Explore the location where you live and find interesting objects to capture in the vicinity. Using the most interesting photo essay examples, you can decide how to make the best decisions. Don’t hurry and try to discover which angles you can use to capture the unique atmosphere of each place.

If you live in the city, you may capture architectural details, wide shots of busy streets, or just take photos of passersby and street signs. Think about the details that make every location unique. For instance, you can try capturing reflections to see how they allow you to see the city from an unusual angle. You can find reflections everywhere, so be sure to pay attention to mirrored buildings, puddles, and fountains.

5. Place Over Time

• View the “At Home in the Ozarks” photo essay by Kylee Cole .

If you want to document changes and show how the streets, buildings, and parks in your city change over time, select your favorite locations and start to visit them regularly to capture the way they look during different seasons.

• View the “Last Moments” photo essay by Ross Taylor .

You don’t necessarily have to focus on profound photo essay topics to evoke emotions. Capturing pets enjoying their worry-free and untroubled life seems like an easy but interesting activity.

Choose any animal – from a domestic bird to a dog, cat, or horse. For more emotional images, use such pet photography ideas when your pet is still a baby and recreate these shots when it is older or is in its final days.

7. Street Style

• View the Tribal Street Photography photo essay by Hans Eijkelboom .

People often express themselves with the help of clothes. The way passers-by on the streets are dressed may reflect the clothing style of a whole society. That’s why you can travel around the world and capture people’s outfits in various areas. When taking portrait photos in the streets, you can also include some of the surroundings to put them in the context.

You can ask people in the streets to pose for you or try to capture them in movement. Select a suitable location for taking photos and create a photo essay to document what kinds of people one can meet in this location. When doing urban photography , you should ask people for permission before taking photos of them. You can ask their contacts and send them your photos later.

8. Abandoned Building

• View the “Lost Collective” photo essay by Bret Pattman .

Old buildings are excellent architecture photography essay topics for students since you can capture a large number of elements. They allow you to imagine what a particular street looked like in the past. You may use a photo essay example for students as references.

Get approval before going in, but mind that such places are far from being totally safe. Bring various lenses: the macro lenses – for details and the wide-angle one – when you want to include many elements in one shot.

9. Alternative Lifestyles

• View the “Last Nomad Hippies” photo essay by Roberto Palomo .

Some people decide to lead a lifestyle that differs from the one generally accepted by society. Explore different areas and look for people with an unusual way of living. You can capture candid photos of regular people or take pictures of a person with an unusual hobby.

Take pictures of those, who reside in extraordinary conditions, representatives of various subcultures, or the LBGTQ community. These photo essay topics show other people that it is okay to go out of their comfort zone and run against the wind.

10. Social Issues

• View the “Juveniles in Prison” photo essay by Isadora Kosofsky .

The best photo essay examples for students are related to social issues, like unemployment, domestic violence, gender discrimination, and more. Address the topic carefully and look for a proper perspective.

Your shots may draw the people’s attention to a truly burning and relevant matter and have a stronger effect than any text.

11. Behind the Scenes

• View the “Follow Me” photo essay by Marius Masalar .

If you are going to visit an event, get ready to take some behind-the-scenes photos. For instance, you can document the preparations for a festival. Capture the work of the lead event planner and other professionals to tell the story of the festival from an unusual angle.

Alternatively, you can capture the events happening backstage during a drama production. Take pictures of actors and actresses when they are getting ready for the performance. Try capturing the emotions of the main lead and show how stage workers make final preparations. You can also document the work of designers and makeup professionals.

12. Landmarks

• View the “Volte-Face” photo essay by Oliver Curtis .

The pictures of landmarks are typically taken from a certain spot. One of the best photo essay ideas is to try shooting sights from various angles. You will also have an opportunity to improve your composition and your framing skills.

If you take a look at any pictorial essay example, you will see that the variety of perspectives is endless: through the streets, in the morning, afternoon, and evening, with a drone or including reflections.

    • View the “Family” photo essay by Olivia Moore .

You can capture the way family members interact with each other and demonstrate the strong connection they share. In some cases, it makes sense to focus on capturing candid photos when doing family photography .

However, you may also opt for a different approach and focus on more difficult social topics. For instance, if you want to examine the issue of immigration, you can take pictures of a family from another country. In addition, you may show how families cope with other social issues, including poverty or unequal access to healthcare.

14. A Day in the Life

• View the “A Day in the Life of Carlos Gaytan” photo essay by Sandy Noto .

One of the best photo essays concepts is related to a day in a person’s life. The main character can be any person – a relative, family member, teacher, writer, or policeman.

People are generally interested in finding out facts about the lives and daily routines of others. The life of every human is incredible, especially if you learn it in more detail. This idea is especially suitable for taking documentary photos. For instance, you can select any photo essay sample you like and then capture a portrait of a person with the tools they use for their work.

15. Education

• View the “School Day” photo essay by Nancy Borowick .

You can also take great photos in the classroom capturing the interactions of teachers and their students. Avoid distracting them, as it will be easier for you to take natural shots. Using a variety of settings, you can make your photo essay more engaging. For instance, you may visit chemistry labs, capture teachers during a break, and take photos in other locations.

• View the “Meals From the Motherland” photo essay by James Tran .

You can also focus on specific meals to create a professional photo essay about food. To make it more attention-grabbing, try using different food photography ideas .

For instance, you can take photos of popular meals, capture the meals made by a specific person, or document cooking traditions in different countries. When taking photos in a restaurant, pay attention to the surroundings as well to capture the unique atmosphere of a place.

17. Capture the Neighbors

• View the “Our Neighbors” photo essay by Jeanne Martin .

Regardless of the place where you live, you have to establish good relationships with your neighbors. People who live nearby can also be great models for professionals who specialize in portrait photography. To implement this idea, make sure to capture people at home or in front of their houses to include some of the surroundings in your photo essay.

You will discover many interesting facts about people who live nearby. Shooting a photo essay will allow you to learn them better and establish a strong connection with them. This way, you can create a sense of community and discover what holds its members together.

18. Climate Change

• View the “Effects of Climate Change” photo essay by Sanya Gupta .

It is possible to a variety of photo story ideas bring to life examining the impact of climate change. Travel to places most affected by climate change, for instance, glaciers or famous resorts.

Capture the way the continuous drought has influenced the environment, animals, and the inhabitants. As an alternative, take pictures of environmentalist protests or inexhaustible energy sources.

Photo Essay Tips for Students

Explore your topic . An in-depth exploration of the main topic of your photo essay will help you find the best ideas for conveying your message. You can also find some sources for inspiration and useful materials. This stage allows you to learn more about your subject and select the best way of organizing your photo essay.

Create a storyboard . Using a storyboard, you can better understand what shots you need to take and what order can help you to tell a story in the best way. It will also allow you to create the right mood.

Take as many pictures as you can . To create a compelling story, make sure to take a lot of photos. It will allow you to choose the best pictures for your photo essay. Besides, you will always have backup photos if some of your pictures get damaged.

Experiment with different techniques . By changing the angle and using a variety of editing techniques, you can transform the way your photos look. When taking photos, try using different angles to capture the subject in the best way. You can also try changing the distance from the model, using black-and-white film, or employing a range of developing methods.

Add text . While some photographers create photo essays without text, it can still help you bring your point across more clearly and make it easier for a viewer to understand what you imply. By providing extra information, such as some facts, you can change the perception of your image. If you don’t know how to write descriptions, you can hire a professional writer to perform this task.

Enhance your photos . To edit your pictures, make sure to use professional photo editing software like Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop. Using the available tools, you can improve and change your photos. They allow you to fix issues with lighting, adjust WB, make colors richer, crop your pics to improve the composition, and perform other tasks. In case you need to edit your photos in a consistent style, you can use Photoshop Actions or Lightroom Presets.

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How to Create an Engaging Photo Essay (with Examples)

Photo essays tell a story in pictures. They're a great way to improve at photography and story-telling skills at once. Learn how to do create a great one.

Learn | Photography Guides | By Ana Mireles

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Photography is a medium used to tell stories – sometimes they are told in one picture, sometimes you need a whole series. Those series can be photo essays.

If you’ve never done a photo essay before, or you’re simply struggling to find your next project, this article will be of help. I’ll be showing you what a photo essay is and how to go about doing one.

You’ll also find plenty of photo essay ideas and some famous photo essay examples from recent times that will serve you as inspiration.

If you’re ready to get started, let’s jump right in!

Table of Contents

What is a Photo Essay?

A photo essay is a series of images that share an overarching theme as well as a visual and technical coherence to tell a story. Some people refer to a photo essay as a photo series or a photo story – this often happens in photography competitions.

Photographic history is full of famous photo essays. Think about The Great Depression by Dorothea Lange, Like Brother Like Sister by Wolfgang Tillmans, Gandhi’s funeral by Henri Cartier Bresson, amongst others.

What are the types of photo essay?

Despite popular belief, the type of photo essay doesn’t depend on the type of photography that you do – in other words, journalism, documentary, fine art, or any other photographic genre is not a type of photo essay.

Instead, there are two main types of photo essays: narrative and thematic .

As you have probably already guessed, the thematic one presents images pulled together by a topic – for example, global warming. The images can be about animals and nature as well as natural disasters devastating cities. They can happen all over the world or in the same location, and they can be captured in different moments in time – there’s a lot of flexibility.

A narrative photo essa y, on the other hand, tells the story of a character (human or not), portraying a place or an event. For example, a narrative photo essay on coffee would document the process from the planting and harvesting – to the roasting and grinding until it reaches your morning cup.

What are some of the key elements of a photo essay?

• Tell a unique story – A unique story doesn’t mean that you have to photograph something that nobody has done before – that would be almost impossible! It means that you should consider what you’re bringing to the table on a particular topic.
• Put yourself into the work – One of the best ways to make a compelling photo essay is by adding your point of view, which can only be done with your life experiences and the way you see the world.
• Add depth to the concept – The best photo essays are the ones that go past the obvious and dig deeper in the story, going behind the scenes, or examining a day in the life of the subject matter – that’s what pulls in the spectator.
• Nail the technique – Even if the concept and the story are the most important part of a photo essay, it won’t have the same success if it’s poorly executed.
• Build a structure – A photo essay is about telling a thought-provoking story – so, think about it in a narrative way. Which images are going to introduce the topic? Which ones represent a climax? How is it going to end – how do you want the viewer to feel after seeing your photo series?
• Make strong choices – If you really want to convey an emotion and a unique point of view, you’re going to need to make some hard decisions. Which light are you using? Which lens? How many images will there be in the series? etc., and most importantly for a great photo essay is the why behind those choices.

9 Tips for Creating a Photo Essay

Credit: Laura James

1. Choose something you know

To make a good photo essay, you don’t need to travel to an exotic location or document a civil war – I mean, it’s great if you can, but you can start close to home.

Depending on the type of photography you do and the topic you’re looking for in your photographic essay, you can photograph a local event or visit an abandoned building outside your town.

It will be much easier for you to find a unique perspective and tell a better story if you’re already familiar with the subject. Also, consider that you might have to return a few times to the same location to get all the photos you need.

2. Follow your passion

Most photo essays take dedication and passion. If you choose a subject that might be easy, but you’re not really into it – the results won’t be as exciting. Taking photos will always be easier and more fun if you’re covering something you’re passionate about.

3. Take your time

A great photo essay is not done in a few hours. You need to put in the time to research it, conceptualizing it, editing, etc. That’s why I previously recommended following your passion because it takes a lot of dedication, and if you’re not passionate about it – it’s difficult to push through.

4. Write a summary or statement

Photo essays are always accompanied by some text. You can do this in the form of an introduction, write captions for each photo or write it as a conclusion. That’s up to you and how you want to present the work.

5. Learn from the masters

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Making a photographic essay takes a lot of practice and knowledge. A great way to become a better photographer and improve your storytelling skills is by studying the work of others. You can go to art shows, review books and magazines and look at the winners in photo contests – most of the time, there’s a category for photo series.

6. Get a wide variety of photos

Think about a story – a literary one. It usually tells you where the story is happening, who is the main character, and it gives you a few details to make you engage with it, right?

The same thing happens with a visual story in a photo essay – you can do some wide-angle shots to establish the scenes and some close-ups to show the details. Make a shot list to ensure you cover all the different angles.

Some of your pictures should guide the viewer in, while others are more climatic and regard the experience they are taking out of your photos.

7. Follow a consistent look

Both in style and aesthetics, all the images in your series need to be coherent. You can achieve this in different ways, from the choice of lighting, the mood, the post-processing, etc.

8. Be self-critical

Once you have all the photos, make sure you edit them with a good dose of self-criticism. Not all the pictures that you took belong in the photo essay. Choose only the best ones and make sure they tell the full story.

9. Ask for constructive feedback

Often, when we’re working on a photo essay project for a long time, everything makes perfect sense in our heads. However, someone outside the project might not be getting the idea. It’s important that you get honest and constructive criticism to improve your photography.

How to Create a Photo Essay in 5 Steps

Credit: Quang Nguyen Vinh

1. Choose your topic

This is the first step that you need to take to decide if your photo essay is going to be narrative or thematic. Then, choose what is it going to be about?

Ideally, it should be something that you’re interested in, that you have something to say about it, and it can connect with other people.

2. Research your topic

To tell a good story about something, you need to be familiar with that something. This is especially true when you want to go deeper and make a compelling photo essay. Day in the life photo essays are a popular choice, since often, these can be performed with friends and family, whom you already should know well.

3. Plan your photoshoot

Depending on what you’re photographing, this step can be very different from one project to the next. For a fine art project, you might need to find a location, props, models, a shot list, etc., while a documentary photo essay is about planning the best time to do the photos, what gear to bring with you, finding a local guide, etc.

Every photo essay will need different planning, so before taking pictures, put in the required time to get things right.

4. Experiment

It’s one thing to plan your photo shoot and having a shot list that you have to get, or else the photo essay won’t be complete. It’s another thing to miss out on some amazing photo opportunities that you couldn’t foresee.

So, be prepared but also stay open-minded and experiment with different settings, different perspectives, etc.

5. Make a final selection

Editing your work can be one of the hardest parts of doing a photo essay. Sometimes we can be overly critical, and others, we get attached to bad photos because we put a lot of effort into them or we had a great time doing them.

Try to be as objective as possible, don’t be afraid to ask for opinions and make various revisions before settling down on a final cut.

7 Photo Essay Topics, Ideas & Examples

Credit: Michelle Leman

• Architectural photo essay

Using architecture as your main subject, there are tons of photo essay ideas that you can do. For some inspiration, you can check out the work of Francisco Marin – who was trained as an architect and then turned to photography to “explore a different way to perceive things”.

You can also lookup Luisa Lambri. Amongst her series, you’ll find many photo essay examples in which architecture is the subject she uses to explore the relationship between photography and space.

• Process and transformation photo essay

This is one of the best photo essay topics for beginners because the story tells itself. Pick something that has a beginning and an end, for example, pregnancy, the metamorphosis of a butterfly, the life-cycle of a plant, etc.

Keep in mind that these topics are linear and give you an easy way into the narrative flow – however, it might be difficult to find an interesting perspective and a unique point of view.

• A day in the life of ‘X’ photo essay

There are tons of interesting photo essay ideas in this category – you can follow around a celebrity, a worker, your child, etc. You don’t even have to do it about a human subject – think about doing a photo essay about a day in the life of a racing horse, for example – find something that’s interesting for you.

• Time passing by photo essay

It can be a natural site or a landmark photo essay – whatever is close to you will work best as you’ll need to come back multiple times to capture time passing by. For example, how this place changes throughout the seasons or maybe even over the years.

A fun option if you live with family is to document a birthday party each year, seeing how the subject changes over time. This can be combined with a transformation essay or sorts, documenting the changes in interpersonal relationships over time.

• Travel photo essay

Do you want to make the jump from tourist snapshots into a travel photo essay? Research the place you’re going to be travelling to. Then, choose a topic.

If you’re having trouble with how to do this, check out any travel magazine – National Geographic, for example. They won’t do a generic article about Texas – they do an article about the beach life on the Texas Gulf Coast and another one about the diverse flavors of Texas.

The more specific you get, the deeper you can go with the story.

• Socio-political issues photo essay

This is one of the most popular photo essay examples – it falls under the category of photojournalism or documental photography. They are usually thematic, although it’s also possible to do a narrative one.

Depending on your topic of interest, you can choose topics that involve nature – for example, document the effects of global warming. Another idea is to photograph protests or make an education photo essay.

It doesn’t have to be a big global issue; you can choose something specific to your community – are there too many stray dogs? Make a photo essay about a local animal shelter. The topics are endless.

• Behind the scenes photo essay

A behind-the-scenes always make for a good photo story – people are curious to know what happens and how everything comes together before a show.

Depending on your own interests, this can be a photo essay about a fashion show, a theatre play, a concert, and so on. You’ll probably need to get some permissions, though, not only to shoot but also to showcase or publish those images.

4 Best Photo Essays in Recent times

Now that you know all the techniques about it, it might be helpful to look at some photo essay examples to see how you can put the concept into practice. Here are some famous photo essays from recent times to give you some inspiration.

Habibi by Antonio Faccilongo

This photo essay wan the World Press Photo Story of the Year in 2021. Faccilongo explores a very big conflict from a very specific and intimate point of view – how the Israeli-Palestinian war affects the families.

He chose to use a square format because it allows him to give order to things and eliminate unnecessary elements in his pictures.

With this long-term photo essay, he wanted to highlight the sense of absence and melancholy women and families feel towards their husbands away at war.

The project then became a book edited by Sarah Leen and the graphics of Ramon Pez.

Picture This: New Orleans by Mary Ellen Mark

The last assignment before her passing, Mary Ellen Mark travelled to New Orleans to register the city after a decade after Hurricane Katrina.

The images of the project “bring to life the rebirth and resilience of the people at the heart of this tale”, – says CNNMoney, commissioner of the work.

Each survivor of the hurricane has a story, and Mary Ellen Mark was there to record it. Some of them have heartbreaking stories about everything they had to leave behind.

Others have a story of hope – like Sam and Ben, two eight-year-olds born from frozen embryos kept in a hospital that lost power supply during the hurricane, yet they managed to survive.

Selfie by Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman is an American photographer whose work is mainly done through self-portraits. With them, she explores the concept of identity, gender stereotypes, as well as visual and cultural codes.

One of her latest photo essays was a collaboration with W Magazine entitled Selfie. In it, the author explores the concept of planned candid photos (‘plandid’).

The work was made for Instagram, as the platform is well known for the conflict between the ‘real self’ and the one people present online. Sherman started using Facetune, Perfect365 and YouCam to alter her appearance on selfies – in Photoshop, you can modify everything, but these apps were designed specifically to “make things prettier”- she says, and that’s what she wants to explore in this photo essay.

Tokyo Compression by Michael Wolf

Michael Wolf has an interest in the broad-gauge topic Life in Cities. From there, many photo essays have been derived – amongst them – Tokyo Compression .

He was horrified by the way people in Tokyo are forced to move to the suburbs because of the high prices of the city. Therefore, they are required to make long commutes facing 1,5 hours of train to start their 8+ hour workday followed by another 1,5 hours to get back home.

To portray this way of life, he photographed the people inside the train pressed against the windows looking exhausted, angry or simply absent due to this way of life.

You can visit his website to see other photo essays that revolve around the topic of life in megacities.

Final Words

It’s not easy to make photo essays, so don’t expect to be great at it right from your first project.

Start off small by choosing a specific subject that’s interesting to you –  that will come from an honest place, and it will be a great practice for some bigger projects along the line.

Whether you like to shoot still life or you’re a travel photographer, I hope these photo essay tips and photo essay examples can help you get started and grow in your photography.

Let us know which topics you are working on right now – we’ll love to hear from you!

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Ana Mireles is a Mexican researcher that specializes in photography and communications for the arts and culture sector.

Penelope G. To Ana Mireles Such a well written and helpful article for an writer who wants to inclue photo essay in her memoir. Thank you. I will get to work on this new skill. Penelope G.

Herman Krieger Photo essays in black and white

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Ten examples of immersive photo essays

By Marissa Sapega — Contributing Writer

Photo essays are one of the most powerful forms of storytelling in the last century. From the great depression photographer W. Eugene Smith to the photojournalism of National Geographic or Life Magazine , the best photo essays entertain, educate, and move readers more than words alone ever could. 

But photo essays have changed. Over the last decade, web publishing technologies — including web browsers and file formats — have improved by leaps and bounds. A good photo essays today is more than a collection of images. It’s a truly interactive, immersive, and multimedia experiences.

In this guide, we introduce 10 stunning examples of visually arresting interactive photo essays to fuel your creative juices.

Now, let's set the scene with a short introduction to immersive, interactive photo essays on the web.

What do the BBC, Tripadvisor, and Penguin have in common? They craft stunning, interactive web content with Shorthand. And so can you! Publish your first story for free — no code or web design skills required. Sign up now.

The rise of immersive, interactive photo essays

What is an immersive, interactive photo essay? Let's take these terms one at a time. 

An immersive photo essay uses rich media and story design to capture and keep the reader's attention. Immersive content is typically free of the most distracting elements of the web, such as pop-ups, skyscrapers, and other intrusions on the reading experience.

As a basic rule of thumb, immersive content respects the reader's attention. 

An interactive photo essay is one that allows the reader to control how the content appears. It may include interactive elements, like maps and embedded applications.

More commonly, modern interactive photo stories use a technique known as scrollytelling . Scrollytelling stories allow the reader to trigger animations and other visual effects as they scroll. Many of the examples in this guide use scrollytelling techniques. Read more scrollytelling examples .

Until relatively recently, immersive, interactive photo essays could only be created with the help of a designer or web developer. But with the rise of digital storytelling platforms , anyone can create compelling, dynamic stories without writing a single line of code.

If you're looking to learn more about how to create a photo essay — or are looking for more photo essay ideas  — check out our introduction to photo essays . 

Photo essay topics

If you’re looking for photo essay examples, chances are you’re looking to create a photo essay for yourself. If you’re just getting started, you might want some guidance on exactly what kinds of topics make for great photo essays.

More experienced photographers — feel free to skip this section. But for those who are just starting out, here’s a quick list of classic photo essay subject matter, for all types of photo essays.

• Local events. A great way to start out is photograph local events in your community, such as a high school fundraiser. A bonus is that you’ll have a ready
• Historic sites. Another classic photo essay topic is an exploration of a historic site. This could be a building, a monument, or even just a specific location that has significance.
• Profile of a person. A great way to get to know someone is to profile them in a photo essay. This could be a family member, friend, or even just someone you’ve met.
• Animals in captivity. Another popular subject matter for photo essays is animals in captivity, whether that’s at a zoo or elsewhere.
• A day in the life. Have you ever wondered what it’s like to live someone else’s life for a day? Why not find out and document it in a photo essay?
• Street photography. Another great way to practice your photography skills is to head out into the streets and photograph the everyday lives of people around you. The world has plenty of photo essays of cities like New York and London. But what about street photography in your own backyard?
• Still life photography. Still life photography is all about capturing inanimate objects on film. This could be anything from flowers to furniture to food. It’s a great way to practice your photography skills and learn about composition
• Landscapes . Landscape photography is one of the most popular genres, and for good reason. There are endless possibilities when it comes to finding interesting subjects to shoot. So get out there and start exploring!
• Abandoned buildings. There’s something fascinating about abandoned buildings. They offer a glimpse into the past, and can be eerily beautiful. If you have any in your area, they make for great photo essay subjects.
• Lifestyles. Document someone who lives a lifestyle that’s different from your own. This could be a portrayal of an everyday person, or it could be someone with an unusual job or hobby.
• Social issues. Take photos depicting significant social issues in your community, remembering to respect your subjects.

Ten inspiring photo essay examples

Pink lagoon and peculiar galaxies — July’s best science images

In Pink lagoon and peculiar galaxies , Nature present a mesmerising series of images from the natural world. Highlights include:

• a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it photo of rare albino orcas performing feats of synchronized swimming;
• an arresting aerial view of the aftermath of the flash floods in Germany; and,
• a scarlet gawping Venus flytrap sea anemone. 

The best part? Nature publishes similarly powerful photo essays every month, showcasing some of the best and most creative photography of the natural world anywhere on the web.

Vanishing Lands

Vanishing lands — an ominously interesting photo essay from media company Stuff — opens with a bucolic visual featuring meandering sheep flanked by breathtaking mountains that blur into obscurity.

Soon, more awe-inspiring photos of breathtaking New Zealand farmland appear, accompanied by expressive prose whose tone matches the visuals’ stark beauty.

In this unflinchingly honest photographic essay, Stuff takes the viewer behind the scenes with a day in the life of a high country sheep farmer facing an uncertain future. One stunning photo fades into the next as you scroll through, broken only by the occasional noteworthy quote and accompanying narrative.

Olympic photos: Emotion runs high

This emotionally wrought sports story from NBC begins with a close-up of an anxious Simone Biles, her expression exemplifying the tension and frustration echoed on so many of her fellow athletes’ faces.

The subtitle puts it perfectly: “The agony—and thrill—of competition at the Olympics is written all over their faces.”

Devastation, disappointment, and defeat take centre stage in this piece — but not all the subjects of the photos in this compelling photography essay depict misery. Some of the images, like that taken of the gold medal-winning Russian artistic gymnasts, manage to project the athletes’ joy almost beyond the edges of the screen.

The NBC editors who created this visual story chose to display the series of photos using the entire screen width and limit the copy to simple captions, letting the visuals speak for themselves. The result is a riveting montage of photographs that manage to capture the overarching sentiment of the 2020 Olympic Games.

James Epp: A Twist of the Hand

In A Twist of the Hand , the Museum of Classical Archaeology at the University of Cambridge have produced a gorgeous photo essay. This online art show showcases artist James Epp’s installation, combining photographs of the exhibit with images of museum prints and authentic artefacts.

As you scroll down, close-up shots of the installation make you feel like you’re physically wandering among the ancient sculptures, able to examine hairline spider cracks and tiny divots marking the surface of every antiquated figure. In between the photos—and often flanked by museum prints—are James Epp's musings about what inspired him to create the pieces. It’s an absorbing virtual gallery that will no doubt inspire real life visits to the exhibition.

The Café Racer Revolution

Though it’s a cleverly built piece of interactive content marketing , Honda’s “ Café Racer Revolution ” is also a great photo essay. Alongside information about the latest and greatest motorcycles Honda has to offer, it details the history of the bikers who sought to employ motorcycles (specifically “café racers”) as a way to forge an identity for themselves and project a “statement of individuality.”

Scroll down, and nostalgic black-and-white photos give way to contemporary action shots featuring fully decked-out motorcyclists on various Honda models.

Dynamic photos of bikes rotate them 360 degrees when you mouse over them, and text superimposed over flashy shots rolls smoothly down the screen as you scroll. This photo essay will stir a longing to hit the open road for anyone who has ever dreamed of owning one of Honda’s zippy bikes.

Built to keep Black from white

In Built to keep Black from white , NBC News and BridgeDetroit have built a stunning narrative photo essay that encapsulates the history of Detroit’s Birwood Wall — a literal dividing line intended to separate neighborhoods inhabited by people of different races. 

The piece begins with a brief history of the concrete barrier. Between paragraphs of text, it weaves in quotes from residents who grew up as the wall was erected and a short video. Animated maps highlighting the affected neighborhoods unspool across the screen as you scroll down, accompanied by brief explanations of what the maps represent.

In the series of photographs that follow, contemporary images transition into decades-old shots of the wall when it was newly constructed. This is followed by images of original real estate documents, resident portraits, and additional animated maps — each considering the issue from different angles.

The piece ends with an interactive display of how Detroit’s racial makeup has changed over the past several decades, from majority white to black, and how the wall has impacted the lives of its residents who lived (and died) within its borders.

The story of Black Lives Matter in sport

The BBC pairs illustrations and bold imagery in this photo essay on how athletes participated in the Black Lives Matter movement . At the start, a narrow column of text leads into an iconic image of American football players kneeling during the pre-game national anthem in a solemn protest against police brutality. 

The first excerpt, a summary of Trayvon Martin’s death in 2012, draws you in with piercing prose capped off with photographs that bleed into one another. Every account in the photo essay follows this layout.

WaterAid Climate Stories

Climate change affects everyone on the planet, but some people are feeling the effects more than others. WaterAid’s scrollytelling photo essay illuminates the plight of individuals living in areas where extreme weather conditions — caused by climate change — have drastically impacted the water supply and environment, endangering their livelihoods and ability to survive.

This climate change story starts with an engrossing video that provides an up-close and personal look at the devastation that climate change-induced droughts have wreaked on people and the environment. As you scroll down, images of massively depleted bodies of water with superimposed text and quotes unfold before your eyes. It’s an efficient way to drive home the critical message WaterAid wants to convey: climate change is real, and it’s harming real people.

Each extreme weather story focuses on an individual to help viewers empathise and understand that climate change has real, drastic consequences for millions of people worldwide. The piece ends with a call to action to learn more about and financially support WaterAid’s fight to assist people living in the desperate situations depicted in the essay.

28 Days in Afghanistan

In this piece, Australian photo-journalist Andrew Quilty tells the story of the four weeks he spent in Afghanistan . He captures daily events ranging from the mundane—like a casual visit to his barber—to jarring. More than one photo documents blood-spattered victims of violence.

Viewers must scroll through the piece to follow Andrew’s daily musings and the striking photos that accompany them. His photo essay is a powerful example of how scrollytelling is transforming the art of long-form journalism .

La carrera lunática de Musk y Bezos (Musk and Bezos' lunatic careers)

Billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are angling to conquer the final frontier: space.

El Periódico captures their story via a whimsically illustrated photo essay, filled with neon line drawings and bold photos of the massive spaceships, the hangars that house them, and footprints on the moon. La carrera lunática de Musk y Bezos describes the battle between the two titans’ space companies (Blue Origin and SpaceX) for the honor of partially funding NASA’s next mission to the moon.

As you scroll down, white and fluorescent yellow words on a black background roll smoothly over images. The team at El Periódico slips in stylistic animations to break up the text—such as rocket ships with shimmering “vapour trails”—then ups the ante with a series of moon images that transition into portraits of the 12 U.S. astronauts who visited the celestial body.

The photo essay ends with the question: “Who will be the next to leave their footprints on the dusty lunar soil?” At the time of publishing, NASA had not yet decided between the two companies. (Spoiler alert: SpaceX won .)

Marissa Sapega is a seasoned writer, editor, and digital marketer with a background in web and graphic design.

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What is a Photo Essay? 9 Photo Essay Examples You Can Recreate

A photo essay is a series of photographs that tell a story. Unlike a written essay, a photo essay focuses on visuals instead of words. With a photo essay, you can stretch your creative limits and explore new ways to connect with your audience. Whatever your photography skill level, you can recreate your own fun and creative photo essay.

9 Photo Essay Examples You Can Recreate

• Photowalk Photo Essay
• Transformation Photo Essay
• Day in the Life Photo Essay
• Event Photo Essay
• Building Photo Essay
• Historic Site or Landmark Photo Essay
• Behind the Scenes Photo Essay
• Family Photo Essay
• Education Photo Essay

Stories are important to all of us. While some people gravitate to written stories, others are much more attuned to visual imagery. With a photo essay, you can tell a story without writing a word. Your use of composition, contrast, color, and perspective in photography will convey ideas and evoke emotions.

To explore narrative photography, you can use basic photographic equipment. You can buy a camera or even use your smartphone to get started. While lighting, lenses, and post-processing software can enhance your photos, they aren’t necessary to achieve good results.

Whether you need to complete a photo essay assignment or want to pursue one for fun or professional purposes, you can use these photo essay ideas for your photography inspiration . Once you know the answer to “what is a photo essay?” and find out how fun it is to create one, you’ll likely be motivated to continue your forays into photographic storytelling.

1 . Photowalk Photo Essay

One popular photo essay example is a photowalk. Simply put, a photowalk is time you set aside to walk around a city, town, or a natural site and take photos. Some cities even have photowalk tours led by professional photographers. On these tours, you can learn the basics about how to operate your camera, practice photography composition techniques, and understand how to look for unique shots that help tell your story.

Set aside at least two to three hours for your photowalk. Even if you’re photographing a familiar place—like your own home town—try to look at it through new eyes. Imagine yourself as a first-time visitor or pretend you’re trying to educate a tourist about the area.

Walk around slowly and look for different ways to capture the mood and energy of your location. If you’re in a city, capture wide shots of streets, close-ups of interesting features on buildings, street signs, and candid shots of people. Look for small details that give the city character and life. And try some new concepts—like reflection picture ideas—by looking for opportunities to photographs reflections in mirrored buildings, puddles, fountains, or bodies of water.

2 . Transformation Photo Essay

With a transformation photography essay, you can tell the story about change over time. One of the most popular photostory examples, a transformation essay can document a mom-to-be’s pregnancy or a child’s growth from infancy into the toddler years. But people don’t need to be the focus of a transformation essay. You can take photos of a house that is being built or an urban area undergoing revitalization.

You can also create a photo narrative to document a short-term change. Maybe you want to capture images of your growing garden or your move from one home to another. These examples of photo essays are powerful ways of telling the story of life’s changes—both large and small.

3 . Day in the Life Photo Essay

Want a unique way to tell a person’s story? Or, perhaps you want to introduce people to a career or activity. You may want to consider a day in the life essay.

With this photostory example, your narrative focuses on a specific subject for an entire day. For example, if you are photographing a farmer, you’ll want to arrive early in the morning and shadow the farmer as he or she performs daily tasks. Capture a mix of candid shots of the farmer at work and add landscapes and still life of equipment for added context. And if you are at a farm, don’t forget to get a few shots of the animals for added character, charm, or even a dose of humor. These types of photography essay examples are great practice if you are considering pursuing photojournalism. They also help you learn and improve your candid portrait skills.

4 . Event Photo Essay

Events are happening in your local area all the time, and they can make great photo essays. With a little research, you can quickly find many events that you could photograph. There may be bake sales, fundraisers, concerts, art shows, farm markets, block parties, and other non profit event ideas . You could also focus on a personal event, such as a birthday or graduation.

At most events, your primary emphasis will be on capturing candid photos of people in action. You can also capture backgrounds or objects to set the scene. For example, at a birthday party, you’ll want to take photos of the cake and presents.

For a local or community event, you can share your photos with the event organizer. Or, you may be able to post them on social media and tag the event sponsor. This is a great way to gain recognition and build your reputation as a talented photographer.

5. Building Photo Essay

Many buildings can be a compelling subject for a photographic essay. Always make sure that you have permission to enter and photograph the building. Once you do, look for interesting shots and angles that convey the personality, purpose, and history of the building. You may also be able to photograph the comings and goings of people that visit or work in the building during the day.

Some photographers love to explore and photograph abandoned buildings. With these types of photos, you can provide a window into the past. Definitely make sure you gain permission before entering an abandoned building and take caution since some can have unsafe elements and structures.

6. Historic Site or Landmark Photo Essay

Taking a series of photos of a historic site or landmark can be a great experience. You can learn to capture the same site from different angles to help portray its character and tell its story. And you can also photograph how people visit and engage with the site or landmark. Take photos at different times of day and in varied lighting to capture all its nuances and moods.

You can also use your photographic essay to help your audience understand the history of your chosen location. For example, if you want to provide perspective on the Civil War, a visit to a battleground can be meaningful. You can also visit a site when reenactors are present to share insight on how life used to be in days gone by.

7 . Behind the Scenes Photo Essay

Another fun essay idea is taking photos “behind the scenes” at an event. Maybe you can chronicle all the work that goes into a holiday festival from the early morning set-up to the late-night teardown. Think of the lead event planner as the main character of your story and build the story about him or her.

Or, you can go backstage at a drama production. Capture photos of actors and actresses as they transform their looks with costuming and makeup. Show the lead nervously pacing in the wings before taking center stage. Focus the work of stagehands, lighting designers, and makeup artists who never see the spotlight but bring a vital role in bringing the play to life.

8. Family Photo Essay

If you enjoy photographing people, why not explore photo story ideas about families and relationships? You can focus on interactions between two family members—such as a father and a daughter—or convey a message about a family as a whole.

Sometimes these type of photo essays can be all about the fun and joy of living in a close-knit family. But sometimes they can be powerful portraits of challenging social topics. Images of a family from another country can be a meaningful photo essay on immigration. You could also create a photo essay on depression by capturing families who are coping with one member’s illness.

For these projects on difficult topics, you may want to compose a photo essay with captions. These captions can feature quotes from family members or document your own observations. Although approaching hard topics isn’t easy, these types of photos can have lasting impact and value.

9. Education Photo Essay

Opportunities for education photo essays are everywhere—from small preschools to community colleges and universities. You can seek permission to take photos at public or private schools or even focus on alternative educational paths, like homeschooling.

Your education photo essay can take many forms. For example, you can design a photo essay of an experienced teacher at a high school. Take photos of him or her in action in the classroom, show quiet moments grading papers, and capture a shared laugh between colleagues in the teacher’s lounge.

Alternatively, you can focus on a specific subject—such as science and technology. Or aim to portray a specific grade level, document activities club or sport, or portray the social environment. A photo essay on food choices in the cafeteria can be thought-provoking or even funny. There are many potential directions to pursue and many great essay examples.

While education is an excellent topic for a photo essay for students, education can be a great source of inspiration for any photographer.

Why Should You Create a Photo Essay?

Ultimately, photographers are storytellers. Think of what a photographer does during a typical photo shoot. He or she will take a series of photos that helps convey the essence of the subject—whether that is a person, location, or inanimate object. For example, a family portrait session tells the story of a family—who they are, their personalities, and the closeness of their relationship.

Learning how to make a photo essay can help you become a better storyteller—and a better photographer. You’ll cultivate key photography skills that you can carry with you no matter where your photography journey leads.

If you simply want to document life’s moments on social media, you may find that a single picture doesn’t always tell the full story. Reviewing photo essay examples and experimenting with your own essay ideas can help you choose meaningful collections of photos to share with friends and family online.

Learning how to create photo essays can also help you work towards professional photography ambitions. You’ll often find that bloggers tell photographic stories. For example, think of cooking blogs that show you each step in making a recipe. Photo essays are also a mainstay of journalism. You’ll often find photo essays examples in many media outlets—everywhere from national magazines to local community newspapers. And the best travel photographers on Instagram tell great stories with their photos, too.

With a photo essay, you can explore many moods and emotions. Some of the best photo essays tell serious stories, but some are humorous, and others aim to evoke action.

You can raise awareness with a photo essay on racism or a photo essay on poverty. A photo essay on bullying can help change the social climate for students at a school. Or, you can document a fun day at the beach or an amusement park. You have control of the themes, photographic elements, and the story you want to tell.

5 Steps to Create a Photo Essay

Every photo essay will be different, but you can use a standard process. Following these five steps will guide you through every phase of your photo essay project—from brainstorming creative essay topics to creating a photo essay to share with others.

Step 1: Choose Your Photo Essay Topics

Just about any topic you can imagine can form the foundation for a photo essay. You may choose to focus on a specific event, such as a wedding, performance, or festival. Or you may want to cover a topic over a set span of time, such as documenting a child’s first year. You could also focus on a city or natural area across the seasons to tell a story of changing activities or landscapes.

Since the best photo essays convey meaning and emotion, choose a topic of interest. Your passion for the subject matter will shine through each photograph and touch your viewer’s hearts and minds.

Step 2: Conduct Upfront Research

Much of the work in a good-quality photo essay begins before you take your first photo. It’s always a good idea to do some research on your planned topic.

Imagine you’re going to take photos of a downtown area throughout the year. You should spend some time learning the history of the area. Talk with local residents and business owners and find out about planned events. With these insights, you’ll be able to plan ahead and be prepared to take photos that reflect the area’s unique personality and lifestyles.

For any topic you choose, gather information first. This may involve internet searches, library research, interviews, or spending time observing your subject.

Step 3: Storyboard Your Ideas

After you have done some research and have a good sense of the story you want to tell, you can create a storyboard. With a storyboard, you can write or sketch out the ideal pictures you want to capture to convey your message.

You can turn your storyboard into a “shot list” that you can bring with you on site. A shot list can be especially helpful when you are at a one-time event and want to capture specific shots for your photo essay. If you’ve never created a photo essay before, start with ten shot ideas. Think of each shot as a sentence in your story. And aim to make each shot evoke specific ideas or emotions.

Step 4: Capture Images

Your storyboard and shot list will be important guides to help you make the most of each shoot. Be sure to set aside enough time to capture all the shots you need—especially if you are photographing a one-time event. And allow yourself to explore your ideas using different photography composition, perspective, and color contrast techniques.

You may need to take a hundred images or more to get ten perfect ones for your photographic essay. Or, you may find that you want to add more photos to your story and expand your picture essay concept.

Also, remember to look for special unplanned, moments that help tell your story. Sometimes, spontaneous photos that aren’t on your shot list can be full of meaning. A mix of planning and flexibility almost always yields the best results.

Step 5: Edit and Organize Photos to Tell Your Story

After capturing your images, you can work on compiling your photo story. To create your photo essay, you will need to make decisions about which images portray your themes and messages. At times, this can mean setting aside beautiful images that aren’t a perfect fit. You can use your shot list and storyboard as a guide but be open to including photos that weren’t in your original plans.

You may want to use photo editing software—such as Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop— to enhance and change photographs. With these tools, you can adjust lighting and white balance, perform color corrections, crop, or perform other edits. If you have a signature photo editing style, you may want to use Photoshop Actions or Lightroom Presets to give all your photos a consistent look and feel.

You order a photo book from one of the best photo printing websites to publish your photo story. You can add them to an album on a photo sharing site, such as Flickr or Google Photos. Also, you could focus on building a website dedicated to documenting your concepts through visual photo essays. If so, you may want to use SEO for photographers to improve your website’s ranking in search engine results. You could even publish your photo essay on social media. Another thing to consider is whether you want to include text captures or simply tell your story through photographs.

Choose the medium that feels like the best space to share your photo essay ideas and vision with your audiences. You should think of your photo essay as your own personal form of art and expression when deciding where and how to publish it.

Photo Essays Can Help You Become a Better Photographer

Whatever your photography ambitions may be, learning to take a photo essay can help you grow. Even simple essay topics can help you gain skills and stretch your photographic limits. With a photo essay, you start to think about how a series of photographs work together to tell a complete story. You’ll consider how different shots work together, explore options for perspective and composition, and change the way you look at the world.

Before you start taking photos, you should review photo essay examples. You can find interesting pictures to analyze and photo story examples online, in books, or in classic publications, like Life Magazine . Don’t forget to look at news websites for photojournalism examples to broaden your perspective. This review process will help you in brainstorming simple essay topics for your first photo story and give you ideas for the future as well.

Ideas and inspiration for photo essay topics are everywhere. You can visit a park or go out into your own backyard to pursue a photo essay on nature. Or, you can focus on the day in the life of someone you admire with a photo essay of a teacher, fireman, or community leader. Buildings, events, families, and landmarks are all great subjects for concept essay topics. If you are feeling stuck coming up with ideas for essays, just set aside a few hours to walk around your city or town and take photos. This type of photowalk can be a great source of material.

You’ll soon find that advanced planning is critical to your success. Brainstorming topics, conducting research, creating a storyboard, and outlining a shot list can help ensure you capture the photos you need to tell your story. After you’ve finished shooting, you’ll need to decide where to house your photo essay. You may need to come up with photo album title ideas, write captions, and choose the best medium and layout.

Without question, creating a photo essay can be a valuable experience for any photographer. That’s true whether you’re an amateur completing a high school assignment or a pro looking to hone new skills. You can start small with an essay on a subject you know well and then move into conquering difficult ideas. Maybe you’ll want to create a photo essay on mental illness or a photo essay on climate change. Or maybe there’s another cause that is close to your heart.

Whatever your passion, you can bring it to life with a photo essay.

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How to Create a Photo Essay in 9 Steps (with Examples)

Photo Editing , Tutorials

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What is a photo essay?

• Photo essays vs photo stories
• How photo essays help you
• 9 Steps to create photo essays

How to share your photo essays

Read Time: 11 minutes

Gather up a handful of images that seem to go together, and voila! It’s a photo essay, right? Well… no. Though, this is a common misconception.

In reality, a photo essay is much more thoughtful and structured than that. When you take the time to craft one, you’re using skills from all facets of our craft – from composition to curation.

In this guide, you’ll learn what makes a photo essay an amazing project that stretches your skills. You’ll also learn exactly how to make one step by step.

• Photo essay vs photo story

A photo essay is a collection of images based around a theme, a topic, a creative approach, or an exploration of an idea. Photo essays balance visual variety with a cohesive style and concept.

What’s the difference between a photo essay and a photo story?

The terms photo essay and photo story are often used interchangeably. Even the dictionary definition of “photo essay” includes using images to convey either a theme or a story.

But in my experience, a photo essay and a photo story are two different things. As you delve into the field of visual storytelling, distinguishing between the two helps you to take a purposeful approach to what you’re making .

The differences ultimately lie in the distinctions between theme, topic and story.

Themes are big-picture concepts. Example: Wildness

Topics are more specific than themes, but still overarching. Example : Wild bears of Yellowstone National Park

Stories are specific instances or experiences that happen within, or provide an example for, a topic or theme. Example: A certain wild bear became habituated to tourists and was relocated to maintain its wildness

Unlike a theme or topic, a story has particular elements that make it a story. They include leading characters, a setting, a narrative arc, conflict, and (usually) resolution.

With that in mind, we can distingush between a photo essay and a photo story.

Themes and Topics vs Stories

A photo essay revolves around a topic, theme, idea, or concept. It visually explores a big-picture something .

This allows a good deal of artistic leeway where a photographer can express their vision, philosophies, opinions, or artistic expression as they create their images.

A photo story  is a portfolio of images that illustrate – you guessed it – a story.

Because of this, there are distinct types of images that a photo story uses that add to the understanding, insight, clarity and meaning to the story for viewers. While they can certainly be artistically crafted and visually stunning, photo stories document something happening, and rely on visual variety for capturing the full experience.

A photo essay doesn’t need to have the same level of structured variety that a photo story requires. It can have images that overlap or are similar, as they each explore various aspects of a theme.

Photo essays can be about any topic. If you live in a city, consider using your nature photography to make an essay about the wildlife that lives in your neighborhood . 

The role of text with photos

A photo story typically runs alongside text that narrates the story. We’re a visual species, and the images help us feel like we are there, experiencing what’s happening. So, the images add significant power to the text, but they’re often a partner to it.

This isn’t always the case, of course. Sometimes photo stories don’t need or use text. It’s like reading a graphic novel that doesn’t use text. Moving through the different images that build on each other ultimately unveils the narrative.

Photo essays don’t need to rely on text to illuminate the images’ theme or topic. The photographer may use captions (or even a text essay), or they may let the images speak for themselves.

Definitions are helpful guidelines (not strict rules)

Some people categorize photo essays as either narrative or thematic. That’s essentially just calling photo stories “narrative photo essays” and photo essays “thematic photo essays.”

But, a story is a defined thing, and any writer/editor will tell you themes and topics are not the same as stories. And we use the word “story” in our daily lives as it’s defined. So, it makes far more sense to name the difference between a photo essay and a photo story, and bask in the same clarity writers enjoy .

Photo stories illustrate a particular experience, event, narrative, something that happened or is happening.

Photo essays explore an idea, concept, topic, theme, creative approach, big-picture something .

Both photo essays and photo stories are immensely powerful visual tools. And yes, the differences between them can certainly be blurred, as is always the case with art.

Simply use this distinction as a general guideline, providing extra clarity around what you’re making and why you’re making it.

To dig into specific types of images used to create powerful photo stories, check out this training: 6 Must-Have Shots for a Photo Story. 

Meanwhile, let’s dig deeper into photo essays.

Photo essays are a chance to try new styles or techniques that stretch your skills and creativity. This image was part of an essay exploring simplicity and shape, and helped me learn new skills in black and white post-processing.

How photo essays improve your photography

Creating photo essays is an amazing antidote if you’ve ever felt a lack of direction or purpose in your photography. Photo essays help build your photographic skills in at least 3 important ways.

1. You become more strategic in creating a body of work

It’s easy to get stuck in a rut of photographing whatever pops up in front of you. And when you do, you end up with a collection of stand-alone shots.

These singles may work fine as a print, a quick Instagram post, or an addition to your gallery of shots on your website. But amassing a bunch of one-off shots limits your opportunities as a photographer for everything from exhibits to getting your work published.

Building photo essays pushes you to think strategically about what you photograph, why, and how. You’re working toward a particular deliverable – a cohesive visual essay – with the images you create.

This elevates your skills in crafting your photo essay, and in how you curate the rest of your work, from galleries on your website to selecting images to sell as prints .

2. You become more purposeful in your composition skills

Composition is so much more than just following the rule of thirds, golden spirals, or thinking about the angle of light in a shot.

Composition is also about thinking ahead in what you’re trying to accomplish with a photograph – from what you’re saying through it to its emotional impact on a viewer – and where it fits within a larger body of work.

Photo essays push you to think critically about each shot – from coming up with fresh compositions for familiar subjects, to devising surprising compositions to fit within a collection, to creating compositions that expand on what’s already in a photo essay.

You’re pushed beyond creating a single pleasing frame, which leads you to shoot more thoughtfully and proactively than ever.

(Here’s a podcast episode on switching from reactive shooting to proactive shooting .)

3. You develop strong editing and curation skills

Selecting which images stay, and which get left behind is one of the hardest jobs on a photographer’s to-do list. Mostly, it’s because of emotional attachment.

You might think it’s an amazing shot because you know the effort that went into capturing it. Or perhaps when you look at it, you get a twinge of the joy or exhilaration you felt the moment you captured it. There’s also the second-guessing that goes into which of two similar images is the best – which will people like more? So you’re tempted to just show both.

Ultimately, great photographers appear all the more skilled because they only show their best work. That in and of itself is a skill they’ve developed through years of ruthlessly editing their own work.

Because the most powerful photo essays only show a handful of extraordinary images, you’re bound to develop the very same critical skill (and look all the more talented because of it).

Photo essays are also a great stepping stone to creating photo stories. If you’re interested in moving beyond stand-alone shots and building stories, shooting photo essays will get your creative brain limbered up and ready for the adventure of photo stories.

A photo essay exploring the natural history of a favorite species is an exciting opportunity for an in-depth study. For me, that was a photo essay on emotive images of the American dipper (Cinclus mexicanus) as it hunts in streams. 

9 Simple steps to create your photo essays

1. clarify your theme.

Choose a theme, topic, or concept you want to explore. Spend some time getting crystal clear on what you want to focus on. It helps to write out a few sentences, or even a few paragraphs noting:

• What you want the essay to be about
• What kinds of images you want to create as part of it
• How you’ll photograph the images
• The style, techniques, or gear you might use to create your images
• What “success” looks like when you’re done with your photo essay

You don’t have to stick to what you write down, of course. It can change during the image creation process. But fleshing your idea out on paper goes a long way in clarifying your photo essay theme and how you’ll go about creating it.

2. Create your images

Grab your camera and head outside!

As you’re photographing your essay, allow yourself some freedom to experiment. Try unusual compositions or techniques that are new to you.

Stretch your style a little, or “try on” the style of other photographers you admire who have photographed similar subjects.

Photo essays are wonderful opportunities to push yourself outside of your comfort zone and grow as a photographer.

Remember that a photo essay is a visually cohesive collection of images that make sense together. So, while you might stretch yourself into new terrain as you shoot, try to keep that approach, style, or strategy consistent.

Don’t be afraid to create lots of images. It’s great to have lots to choose from in the editing process, which comes up next.

3. Pull together your wide edit

Once you’ve created your images, pull together all the images that might make the cut. This could be as many as 40-60 images. Include anything you want to consider for the final essay in the wide edit.

From here, start weeding out images that:

• are weaker in composition or subject matter
• stand out like a sore thumb from the rest of the collection
• Are similar to other stronger images in the collection

It’s helpful to review the images at thumbnail size. You make more instinctive decisions and can more easily see the body of work as a whole. If an image is strong even at thumbnail size to stand out from similar frames while also partnering well with other images in the collection, that’s a good sign it’s strong enough for the essay.

4. Post-process your images for a cohesive look

Now it’s time to post-process the images. Use whatever editing software you’re comfortable with to polish your images.

Again, a photo essay has a cohesive visual look. If you use presets, filters, or other tools, use them across all the images.

5. Finalize your selection

It’s time to make the tough decisions. Select only the strongest for your photo essay from your group of images.

Each image should be strong enough to stand on its own and make sense as part of the whole group.

Many photo essays range from 8-12 images. But of course, it varies based on the essay. The number of images you have in your final photo essay is up to you.

Remember, less is more. A photo essay is most powerful when each image deserves to be included.

6. Put your images in a purposeful order

Create a visual flow with your images. Decide which image is first, and build from there. Use compositions, colors, and subject matter to decide which image goes next, then next, then next in the order.

Think of it like music: notes are arranged in a way that builds energy, or slows it down, surprise listeners with a new refrain, or drop into a familiar chorus. How the notes are ordered creates emotional arcs for listeners.

How you order your images is similar.

Think of the experience a viewer will have as they look at one image, then the next, and the next. Order your images so they create the experience you want your audience to have.

7. Get feedback

The best photographers make space for feedback, even when it’s tough to hear. Your work benefits from not just hearing feedback, but listening to it and applying what you learn from it.

Show your photo essay to people who have different sensibilities or tastes. Friends, family members, fellow photographers – anyone you trust to give you honest feedback.

Watch their reactions and hear what they say about what they’re seeing. Use their feedback to guide you in the next step.

8. Refine, revise, and finalize

Let your photo essay marinate for a little while. Take a day or two away from it. Then use your freshened eyes and the feedback you received from the previous step to refine your essay.

Swap out any selects you might want to change and reorder the images if needed.

9. Add captions

Even if you don’t plan on displaying captions with your images, captioning your images is a great practice to get into. It gives context, story, and important information to each image. And, more than likely, you will want to use these captions at some point when you share your photo essay, which we dive into later in this article.

Add captions to the image files using Lightroom, Bridge, or other software programs.

Create a document, such as a Google or Word doc, with captions for each image.

In your captions, share a bit about the story behind the image, or the creation process. Add whatever makes sense to share that provides a greater understanding of the image and its purpose.

Photo essays allow you to explore deliberate style choices, such as a focus on shapes, patterns, textures, and lines. Since each photo is part of a larger essay, it encourages you to be bold with choices you might not otherwise make. 

5 Examples of amazing nature photo essays

1. “how the water shapes us” from the nature conservancy.

This gorgeous essay, crafted with the work of multiple photographers, explores the people and places within the Mississippi River basin. Through the images, we gain a sense of how the water influences life from the headwater all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Notice how each photographer is tasked with the same theme, yet approaches it with their own distinct style and vision. It is a wonderful example of the sheer level of visual variety you can have while maintaining a consistent style or theme.

View it here

2. “A Cyclist on the English Landscape” from New York Times’ The World Through A Lens series

This photo essay is a series of self-portraits by travel photographer Roff Smith while “stuck” at home during the pandemic. As he peddled the roads making portraits, the project evolved into a “celebration of traveling at home”. It’s a great example of how visually consistent you can be inside a theme while making each image completely unique.

3. “Vermont, Dressed In Snow” from New York Times’ The World Through A Lens series

This essay by aerial photographer Caleb Kenna uses a very common photo essay theme: snow. Because all images are aerial photographs, there’s a consistency to them. Yet, the compositions are utterly unique from one another. It’s a great example of keeping viewers surprised as they move from one image to the next while still maintaining a clear focus on the theme.

4. “Starling-Studded Skies” from bioGraphic Magazine

This beautiful essay is by Kathryn Cooper, a physicist trained in bioinformatics, and a talented photographer. She used a 19th century photographic technique, chronophotography, to create images that give us a look at the art and science of starling murmurations. She states: “I’m interested in the transient moments when chaos briefly changes to order, and thousands of individual bodies appear to move as one.” This essay is a great example of deep exploration of a concept using a specific photographic technique.

View it here   (Note: must be viewed on desktop)

5. “These Scrappy Photos Capture the Action-Packed World Beneath a Bird Feeder” from Audubon Magazine

This photo essay from conservation photographer Carla Rhodes explores the wildlife that takes advantage of the bounty of food waiting under bird feeders . Using remote camera photography , Rhodes gives viewers a unique ground-level perspective and captures moments that make us feel like we’re in conversation with friends in the Hundred Acre Woods. This essay is a great example of how perspective, personality, and chance can all come into play as you explore both an idea and a technique.

25 Ideas for creative photo essays you can make

The possibilities for photo essays are truly endless – from the concepts you explore to the techniques you use and styles you apply.

Choose an idea, hone your unique perspective on it, then start applying the 9 simple steps from above. 

• The life of a plant or animal (your favorite species, a species living in your yard, etc)
• The many shapes of a single species (a tree species, a bird species, etc)
• How a place changes over time
• The various moods of a place
• A conservation issue you care about
• Math in nature
• Urban nature
• Seasonal changes
• Your yard as a space for nature
• Shifting climate and its impacts
• Human impacts on environments
• Elements: Water, wind, fire, earth
• Day in the life (of a person, a place, a stream, a tree…)
• Outdoor recreation (birding, kayaking, hiking, naturalist journaling…)
• Wildlife rehabilitation
• Lunar cycles
• Sunlight and shadows
• Your local watershed
• Coexistence

As you zero in on a photo essay theme, consider two things: what most excites you about an idea, and what about it pushes you out of your comfort zone. The heady mix of joy and challenge will ensure you stick with it. 

Your photo essay is ready for the world! Decide how you’d like to make an impact with your work. You might use one or several of the options below.

1. Share it on your website

Create a gallery or a scrollytelling page on your website. This is a great way to drive traffic to your website where people can peruse your photo essay and the rest of the photography you have.

Putting it on your website and optimizing your images for SEO helps you build organic traffic and potentially be discovered by a broader audience, including photo editors.

2. Create a scrollytelling web page

If you enjoy the experience of immersive visual experiences, consider making one using your essay. And no, you don’t have to be a whiz at code to make it happen.

Shorthand helps you build web pages with scrollytelling techniques that make a big impression on viewers. Their free plan allows you to publish 3 essays or stories.

3. Create a Medium post

If you don’t have a website and want to keep things simple, a post on Medium is a great option.

Though it’s known for being a platform for bloggers, it’s also possible to add images to a post for a simple scroll.

And, because readers can discover and share posts, it’s a good place for your photos to get the attention of people who might not otherwise come across it.

4. Share it on Instagram

Instagram has changed a lot over the last couple of years, but it’s still a place for photographers to share their work thoughtfully.

There are at least 3 great ways to share your photo essay on the platform.

– Create a single post for each image. Add a caption. Publish one post per day until the full essay is on your feed. Share each post via Instagram Stories to bring more attention and interaction to your photo essay.

– Create a carousel post. You can add up 10 photos to a carousel post, so you may need to create two of them for your full photo essay. Or you might create a series of carousel posts using 3-4 images in each.

– Create a Reel featuring your images as a video.  The algorithm heavily favors reels, so turning your photo essay into a video experience can get it out to a larger audience.

I ran a “create a reel” challenge in my membership community. One member created a reel with her still images around a serious conservation issue. It gathered a ton of attention and landed her opportunities to share her message through YouTube and podcast interviews and publishing opportunities. Watch it here.

5. Exhibit it locally

Reach out to local galleries, cafes, pubs, or even the public library to see if they’re interested in hanging your photo essay for display. Many local businesses and organizations happily support the work of local artists.

6. Pitch your photo essay to publications

One of the best ways to reach an audience with your work is to get it published. Find publications that are a great fit for the theme and style of your photo essay, then pitch your essay for consideration. You gain a fantastic opportunity to share your work widely and can earn a paycheck at the same time.

Remember that if you want to get your photo essay published, you may want to hold back from sharing it publicly before you pitch it to publications.

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Advice for an Unforgettable Photo Essay

Six steps for turning your images into a memorable photo essay, from curating your best work to crafting a title.

A man sits alone on a chair on the side of the road. We see him from above, surrounded by grey cobblestones neatly placed, a broken plastic chair, and some pylons scattered along the curb. A street cat wanders out of the frame and away from the man. He appears lonely, the only person inhabiting the place in which he seems so comfortably seated. As the eye wanders throughout the frame, however, the viewer discovers more: a vast city cast beyond the street and behind the man’s chair. This image closes Sarah Pannell’s photo essay Sehir , a quiet study of urban life.

Possibilities, discovery, and stories: these are some of the most effective elements of a photo essay. Collections of images can help produce a narrative, evoke emotion, and guide the viewer through one or more perspectives. A well-executed photo essay doesn’t rely on a title or any prior knowledge of its creator; it narrates on its own, moving viewers through sensations, lessons, and reactions.

Famous photo essays like Country Doctor by W. Eugene Smith or Gordon Parks’ The Harlem Family are acclaimed for showing a glimpse into the lives of the sick and impoverished. Other well-made photo essays offer a new way to look at the everyday, such as Peter Funch’s much-reposted photo series 42nd and Vanderbilt , for which Funch photographed the same street corner for nine years. As shown by these photographers’ experiences with the medium, a collection of photos can enliven spaces and attitudes. Strong photo essays can give voice to marginalized individuals and shine a spotlight on previously overlooked experiences.

You don’t necessarily need to be a documentary photographer to create a powerful photo essay. Photo essays can showcase any topic, from nature photography to portraiture to wedding shots. We spoke to a few photographers to get their perspectives on what makes a good photo essay, and their tips for how any photographer can get started in this medium. Here are six steps to follow to create a photo essay that tells a memorable story.

Choose a specific topic or theme for your photo essay.

There are two types of photo essays: the narrative and the thematic. Narrative photo essays focus on a story you’re telling the viewer, while thematic photo essays speak to a specific subject.

The most natural method for choosing a topic or theme for your photo essay is to go with what you know. Photograph what you experience. Whether that includes people, objects, or the things you think about throughout the day, accessibility is key here. Common topics or concepts to start with are emotions (depicting sadness or happiness) or experiences (everyday life, city living).

For photographer Sharon Pannen , planning a photo essay is as simple as “picking out a subject you find interesting or you want to make a statement about.”

From Paper & Stories , a photo series by Sharon Pannen for Schön! Magazine.

Consider your photo subjects.

The subjects of your photographs, whether human or not, will fill the space of your photos and influence the mood or idea you’re trying to depict. The subject can determine whether or not your photos are considered interesting. “I always try to find someone that catches my eye. I especially like to see how the light falls on their face and how a certain aesthetic might add to their persona,” says photographer Victoria Wojtan .

While subjects and their interest factor are, well, subjective, when considering your subjects, you should ask yourself about your audience. Do other people want to see this? Is my subject representative of the larger idea my photo essay is trying to convey? Your projects can involve people you know or people you’ve only just met.

“Most projects I work on involve shooting portraits of strangers, so there’s always a tension in approaching someone for a portrait,” says photographer Taylor Dorrell . For Wojtan, that tension can help build trust with a subject and actually leads to more natural images “If there’s tension it’s usually because the person’s new to being photographed by someone for something that’s outside of a candid moment or selfie, and they need guidance for posing. This gives me the opportunity to make them feel more comfortable and let them be themselves. I tend to have a certain idea in mind, but try to allow for organic moments to happen.”

Aim for a variety of images.

Depending on your theme, there are a few types of photos you’ll want to use to anchor your essay. One or two lead photos should slowly introduce the viewer to your topic. These initial photos will function in a similar way to the introductory paragraph in a written essay or news article.

From there, you should consider further developing your narrative by introducing elements like portraiture, close ups, detail shots, and a carefully selected final photo to leave the viewer with the feeling you set out to produce in your photos. Consider your opening and closing images to be the most important elements of your photo essay, and choose them accordingly. You want your first images to hook the viewer, and you also want your final images to leave a lasting impression and perhaps offer a conclusion to the narrative you’ve developed.

Including different types of photos, shot at different ranges, angles, and perspectives, can help engage your viewer and add more texture to your series.

Says photographer Taylor Dorrell: “After I have a group of images, I tend to think about color, composition, the order the images were taken, the subject material, and relevance to the concept.”

From Taylor Dorrell’s photo essay White Fences : “White Fences is an ongoing photo series that explores the theme of suburban youth in the United States, specifically in the midwest suburb New Albany, Ohio.”

Put your emotions aside.

Self-doubt can easily come into play when working with your own photography. The adage that we are our own worst critics is often true. It can be difficult to objectively select your strongest images when creating a photo essay. This is why putting together photo essays is such a useful practice for developing your curatorial skills.

“The most important part for me is getting outside opinions. I don’t do that enough, and have a bias in selecting images that might not be the most powerful images or the most effective sequence of images,” says Dorrell. Your own perception of a photograph can cloud your ability to judge whether or not it adds to your photo essay. This is especially true when your essay deals with personal subjects. For example, a photo essay about your family may be hard to evaluate, as your own feelings about family members will impact how you take and view the photos. This is where getting feedback from peers can be invaluable to producing a strong series.

Collecting feedback while putting your photo essay together can help you determine the strengths, weaknesses, and gaps within the collection of photos you’ve produced. Ask your friends to tell you their favorites, why they like them, and what they think you’re going for in the work you’ve created. Their opinions can be your guide, not just your own emotions.

Edit your photo selection.

Beyond post-production, the series of photos you select as your essay will determine whether you’ve executed your theme or narrative effectively. Can the photos stand alone, without written words, and tell the story you set out to? Do they make sense together, in a logical sequence? The perfect photo essay will give your audience a full picture of the narrative, theme, or essence you’re looking to capture.

A good method to use to cull your images down is to remove as many as half of your images straight away to see if your narrative is still as strong with fewer photos. Or, perhaps, deciding on a small number you’d like to aim for (maybe just five to ten images) and using this as a method to narrow down to the images that tell your story best.

From Taylor Dorrell’s photo essay Over the Rhine , featured in Vice.

Give your photo essay a title, and add a concise written statement.

Finally, you’ll want to create a title and written statement for your photo essay. This will help position your work and can enable the viewer to fully understand your intention, or at least guide their perspective.

A solid written statement and title will be relevant to your topic, detail your primary objective, and introduce your point of view. It’s an opportunity to clarify your intentions to the viewer and ensure they walk away with a clear interpretation of your work. Depending on your photo essay, you may want to include several paragraphs of text, but even just one or two sentences of background can be enough to expand the viewer’s understanding of your work.

Consider if you’d like to add the written statement at the beginning of your essay to introduce it, or at the end as a conclusion. Either one can be impactful, and it depends how you’d like people to experience your work.

For his photo essay White Fences, excerpted above, Taylor Dorrell wrote only one sentence of introduction. But for his series Over the Rhine, Dorell included a longer written statement to accompany the work, which is “an ongoing photo series that seeks to explore the Cincinnati neighborhood of the same name and its surroundings. The series was started in response to the shooting of Samuel DuBose, an unarmed black man, by officer Ray Tensing of the University of Cincinnati Police, which happened July 19th, 2015.” Dorell’s text goes on to offer more background on the project, setting up the viewer with all the information they need to understand the context of the photo essay.

Depending on the motivations behind your photo essay and what sort of subject it depicts, a longer text may be necessary—or just a few words might be enough.

Looking for a place to share your photo essays with the world? Take a look at our guide to creating a photography website for tips on showcasing your photos online.

Cover image by Taylor Dorrell, from his photo essay Hurricane Over Sugar .

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How to Make a Photo Essay: 5 Tips for Impactful Results

A Post By: Christina N Dickson

Want to tell meaningful stories with your photos? That’s what a photo essay is all about: conveying concepts and narratives through a series of carefully chosen images.

While telling a story with photos can be a daunting task, there are several easy tips and techniques you can use in your photo essays to create striking, stunning, eye-opening results.

And that’s what I’m going to share in this article: five photo essay tips that you can immediately apply to your photography. You’ll leave as a better photo essayist than when you arrived!

Let’s get started.

What is a photo essay?

A photo essay is a collection of images placed in a specific order to convey certain emotions , specific concepts, or a progression of events.

In other words:

The photo essay tells stories just like a normal piece of writing , except with images instead of words. (Here, I’m using the term “story” loosely; as mentioned above, photo essays can encapsulate emotions or concepts in addition to traditional, time-based narratives.)

Plenty of world-class photojournalists use photo essays, including Lauren Greenfield, James Nachtwey, and Joachim Ladefoged. But the photo essay format isn’t exclusive to professionals, and photo essays don’t need to cover dramatic events such as wars, natural disasters, and social issues. Whether you are a complete beginner, a hobbyist, or a professional, the photo essay is a great way to bring your images to life, tell relevant stories about your own surroundings, and touch your family, friends, and coworkers.

So without further ado, let’s look at five easy tips to take your photo essays to the next level, starting with:

1. Find a topic you care about

Every good photo essay should start with an idea .

Otherwise, you’ll be shooting without a purpose – and while such an approach may eventually lead to an interesting series of photos, it’s far, far easier to begin with a topic and only then take out your camera.

As I emphasized above, a photo essay can be about anything. You don’t need to fixate on “classic” photo essay themes, such as war and poverty. Instead, you might focus on local issues that matter to you (think of problems plaguing your community). You can also think about interesting stories worth telling, even if they don’t have an activism angle.

For instance, is there an area undergoing major development? Try documenting the work from start to finish. Is there a particular park or nature area you love? Create a series of images that communicate its beauty.

One key item to remember:

Photo essays are most powerful when you, as the photographer, care about the subject. Whether you choose to document something major and public, like an environmental crisis, or whether you choose to document something small and intimate, like the first month of a newborn in the family, make sure you focus on a topic that matters to you .

Otherwise, you’ll struggle to finish the essay – and even if you do successfully complete it, viewers will likely notice your lack of passion.

2. Do your research

The best photo essays involve some real work. Don’t just walk around and shoot with abandon; instead, try to understand your subject.

That way, you can capture a more authentic series of photos.

For instance, if you document a newborn’s first month , spend time with the family. Discover who the parents are, what culture they are from, and their parenting philosophy.

If you cover the process of a school’s drama production, talk with the teachers, actors, and stagehands; investigate the general interest of the student body; find out how the school is financing the production and keeping costs down.

If you photograph a birthday party, check out the theme, the decorations they plan on using, what the birthday kid hopes to get for their gifts.

If you’re passionate about your topic, the research should come easy. You should enjoy learning the backstory.

And then, when it comes time to actually shoot, you’ll have a much clearer understanding of the topic. You’ll know the key players in the story, the key ideas, and the key locations. You’ll be able to hone in on what matters and block out the flashy distractions.

Make sense?

3. Find the right angle

Once you’ve done your research, you’ll know your topic inside and out.

At which point you’ll need to ask yourself:

What is the real, authentic story I want to tell?

Every story has a hundred different angles and perspectives. And trying to share the story from every perspective is a recipe for failure.

Instead, pick a single angle and focus on it. If you’re documenting a local issue, do you want to focus on how it affects children? The physical area? The economy? If you’re documenting a newborn’s first month, do you want to focus on the interaction between the newborn and the parents? The growth of the newborn? The newborn’s emotions?

As you’ll find out during your research, even stories that seem to be completely one-sided have plenty of hidden perspectives to draw on.

So think about your story carefully. In general, I recommend you approach it from the angle you’re most passionate about (consider the previous tip!), but you’re always free to explore different perspectives.

4. Convey emotion

Not all photo essays must convey emotion. But the most powerful ones do.

After all, think of the stories that you know and love. Your favorite books, movies, and TV shows. Do they touch you on an emotional level?

Don’t get me wrong: Every photo essay shouldn’t cover a sappy, heartstring-tugging tale. You can always focus on conveying other emotions: anger, joy, fear, hurt, excitement.

(Of course, if your story is sappy and heartstring-tugging, that’s fine, too – just don’t force it!)

How do you convey emotions, though? There’s no one set way, but you can include photos of meaningful scenes – human interactions generally work well here! – or you can simply show emotion on the faces of your photographic subjects . Really, the best way to communicate emotions through your photos is to feel the emotions yourself; they’ll bleed over into your work for a unique result.

5. Plan your shots

Once you’ve done the research and determined the angle and emotions you’d like to convey, I recommend you sit down, take out a pen and paper, and plan your photo essay .

Should you extensively visualize each photo? Should you walk through the venue, imagining possible compositions ?

Honestly, that’s up to you, and it’ll depend on how you like to work. I do recommend that beginners start out by creating a “shot list” for the essay. Here, you should describe the main subject, the narrative purpose of the image, plus any lighting or composition notes. Once you become more experienced, you can be looser in your planning, though I still recommend you at least think about the different shots you want to capture.

You can start by planning 10 shots. Each one should emphasize a different concept or emotion, but make sure to keep a consistent thread running through every composition; after all, the end goal is to create a powerful series of images that tell a story.

One final tip:

While you should stick to your plan pretty closely, at least at first, don’t ignore the potential for spontaneity. If you see a possible shot, take it! You can later evaluate whether it’s a worthwhile addition to your essay.

Photo essay tips: final words

Now that you’ve finished this article, you know all about what photo essays are, and – hopefully! – how to create a beautiful essay of your own.

Just remember: storytelling takes practice, but you don’t have to be an incredible writer to pull off a powerful photo essay. All you need is a bit of photographic technique, some creativity, and a lot of heart.

Once you start to tell stories with your photos, your portfolio will never be the same!

Now over to you:

Do you have any tips for doing photo essays? Do you have any essays you’re proud of? Share them in the comments below!

Read more from our Tips & Tutorials category

is a visionary artist and philanthropist in Portland Oregon. Her work includes wedding photography www.BrideInspired.com and leadership with www.RevMediaBlog.com .

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Pictures That Tell Stories: Photo Essay Examples

Like any other type of artist, a photographer’s job is to tell a story through their pictures. While some of the most creative among us can invoke emotion or convey a thought with one single photo, the rest of us will rely on a photo essay.

In the following article, we’ll go into detail about what a photo essay is and how to craft one while providing some detailed photo essay examples.

What is a Photo Essay? 

A photo essay is a series of photographs that, when assembled in a particular order, tell a unique and compelling story. While some photographers choose only to use pictures in their presentations, others will incorporate captions, comments, or even full paragraphs of text to provide more exposition for the scene they are unfolding.

A photo essay is a well-established part of photojournalism and have been used for decades to present a variety of information to the reader. Some of the most famous photo essayists include Ansel Adams , W. Eugene Smith, and James Nachtwey. Of course, there are thousands of photo essay examples out there from which you can draw inspiration.

Why Consider Creating a Photo Essay?

As the old saying goes, “a picture is worth 1000 words.” This adage is, for many photographers, reason enough to hold a photo essay in particularly high regard.

For others, a photo essay allow them to take pictures that are already interesting and construct intricate, emotionally-charged tales out of them. For all photographers, it is yet another skill they can master to become better at their craft.

As you might expect, the photo essay have had a long history of being associated with photojournalism. From the Great Depression to Civil Rights Marches and beyond, many compelling stories have been told through a combination of images and text, or photos alone. A photo essay often evokes an intense reaction, whether artistic in nature or designed to prove a socio-political point.

Below, we’ll list some famous photo essay samples to further illustrate the subject.

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Famous Photo Essays

“The Great Depression” by Dorothea Lange – Shot and arranged in the 1930s, this famous photo essay still serves as a stark reminder of The Great Depression and Dust Bowl America . Beautifully photographed, the black and white images offer a bleak insight to one of the country’s most difficult times.

“The Vietnam War” by Philip Jones Griffiths – Many artists consider the Griffiths’ photo essay works to be some of the most important records of the war in Vietnam. His photographs and great photo essays are particularly well-remembered for going against public opinion and showing the suffering of the “other side,” a novel concept when it came to war photography.

Various American Natural Sites by Ansel Adams – Adams bought the beauty of nature home to millions, photographing the American Southwest and places like Yosemite National Park in a way that made the photos seem huge, imposing, and beautiful.

“Everyday” by Noah Kalina – Is a series of photographs arranged into a video. This photo essay features daily photographs of the artist himself, who began taking capturing the images when he was 19 and continued to do so for six years.

“Signed, X” by Kate Ryan – This is a powerful photo essay put together to show the long-term effects of sexual violence and assault. This photo essay is special in that it remains ongoing, with more subjects being added every year.

Common Types of Photo Essays

While a photo essay do not have to conform to any specific format or design, there are two “umbrella terms” under which almost all genres of photo essays tend to fall. A photo essay is thematic and narrative. In the following section, we’ll give some details about the differences between the two types, and then cover some common genres used by many artists.

⬥ Thematic 

A thematic photo essay speak on a specific subject. For instance, numerous photo essays were put together in the 1930s to capture the ruin of The Great Depression. Though some of these presentations followed specific people or families, they mostly told the “story” of the entire event. There is much more freedom with a thematic photo essay, and you can utilize numerous locations and subjects. Text is less common with these types of presentations.

⬥ Narrative 

A narrative photo essay is much more specific than thematic essays, and they tend to tell a much more direct story. For instance, rather than show a number of scenes from a Great Depression Era town, the photographer might show the daily life of a person living in Dust Bowl America. There are few rules about how broad or narrow the scope needs to be, so photographers have endless creative freedom. These types of works frequently utilize text.

Common Photo Essay Genres

Walk a City – This photo essay is when you schedule a time to walk around a city, neighborhood, or natural site with the sole goal of taking photos. Usually thematic in nature, this type of photo essay allows you to capture a specific place, it’s energy, and its moods and then pass them along to others.

The Relationship Photo Essay – The interaction between families and loved ones if often a fascinating topic for a photo essay. This photo essay genre, in particular, gives photographers an excellent opportunity to capture complex emotions like love and abstract concepts like friendship. When paired with introspective text, the results can be quite stunning. 

The Timelapse Transformation Photo Essay – The goal of a transformation photo essay is to capture the way a subject changes over time. Some people take years or even decades putting together a transformation photo essay, with subjects ranging from people to buildings to trees to particular areas of a city.

Going Behind The Scenes Photo Essay – Many people are fascinated by what goes on behind the scenes of big events. Providing the photographer can get access; to an education photo essay can tell a very unique and compelling story to their viewers with this photo essay.

Photo Essay of a Special Event – There are always events and occasions going on that would make an interesting subject for a photo essay. Ideas for this photo essay include concerts, block parties, graduations, marches, and protests. Images from some of the latter were integral to the popularity of great photo essays.

The Daily Life Photo Essay – This type of photo essay often focus on a single subject and attempt to show “a day in the life” of that person or object through the photographs. This type of photo essay can be quite powerful depending on the subject matter and invoke many feelings in the people who view them.

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Photo Essay Ideas and Examples

One of the best ways to gain a better understanding of photo essays is to view some photo essay samples. If you take the time to study these executions in detail, you’ll see just how photo essays can make you a better photographer and offer you a better “voice” with which to speak to your audience.

Some of these photo essay ideas we’ve already touched on briefly, while others will be completely new to you. 

Cover a Protest or March  

Some of the best photo essay examples come from marches, protests, and other events associated with movements or socio-political statements. Such events allow you to take pictures of angry, happy, or otherwise empowered individuals in high-energy settings. The photo essay narrative can also be further enhanced by arriving early or staying long after the protest has ended to catch contrasting images. 

Photograph a Local Event  

Whether you know it or not, countless unique and interesting events are happening in and around your town this year. Such events provide photographers new opportunities to put together a compelling photo essay. From ethnic festivals to historical events to food and beverage celebrations, there are many different ways to capture and celebrate local life.

Visit an Abandoned Site or Building  

Old homes and historical sites are rich with detail and can sometimes appear dilapidated, overgrown by weeds, or broken down by time. These qualities make them a dynamic and exciting subject. Many great photo essay works of abandoned homes use a mix of far-away shots, close-ups, weird angles, and unique lighting. Such techniques help set a mood that the audience can feel through the photographic essay.

Chronicle a Pregnancy

Few photo essay topics could be more personal than telling the story of a pregnancy. Though this photo essay example can require some preparation and will take a lot of time, the results of a photographic essay like this are usually extremely emotionally-charged and touching. In some cases, photographers will continue the photo essay project as the child grows as well.

Photograph Unique Lifestyles  

People all over the world are embracing society’s changes in different ways. People live in vans or in “tiny houses,” living in the woods miles away from everyone else, and others are growing food on self-sustaining farms. Some of the best photo essay works have been born out of these new, inspiring movements.

Photograph Animals or Pets  

If you have a favorite animal (or one that you know very little about), you might want to arrange a way to see it up close and tell its story through images. You can take photos like this in a zoo or the animal’s natural habitat, depending on the type of animal you choose. Pets are another great topic for a photo essay and are among the most popular subjects for many photographers.

Show Body Positive Themes  

So much of modern photography is about showing the best looking, prettiest, or sexiest people at all times. Choosing a photo essay theme like body positivity, however, allows you to film a wide range of interesting-looking people from all walks of life.

Such a photo essay theme doesn’t just apply to women, as beauty can be found everywhere. As a photo essay photographer, it’s your job to find it!

Bring Social Issues to Life  

Some of the most impactful social photo essay examples are those where the photographer focuses on social issues. From discrimination to domestic violence to the injustices of the prison system, there are many ways that a creative photographer can highlight what’s wrong with the world. This type of photo essay can be incredibly powerful when paired with compelling subjects and some basic text.

Photograph Style and Fashion

If you live in or know of a particularly stylish locale or area, you can put together an excellent thematic photo essay by capturing impromptu shots of well-dressed people as they pass by. As with culture, style is easily identifiable and is as unifying as it is divisive. Great photo essay examples include people who’ve covered fashion sub-genres from all over the world, like urban hip hop or Japanese Visual Kei. 

Photograph Native Cultures and Traditions  

If you’ve ever opened up a copy of National Geographic, you’ve probably seen photo essay photos that fit this category. To many, the traditions, dress, religious ceremonies, and celebrations of native peoples and foreign cultures can be utterly captivating. For travel photographers, this photo essay is considered one of the best ways to tell a story with or without text.

Capture Seasonal Or Time Changes In A Landmark Photo Essay

Time-lapse photography is very compelling to most viewers. What they do in a few hours, however, others are doing over months, years, and even decades. If you know of an exciting landscape or scene, you can try to capture the same image in Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall, and put that all together into one landmark photo essay.

Alternatively, you can photograph something being lost or ravaged by time or weather. The subject of your landmark photo essay can be as simple as the wall of an old building or as complex as an old house in the woods being taken over by nature. As always, there are countless transformation-based landmark photo essay works from which you can draw inspiration.

Photograph Humanitarian Efforts or Charity  

Humanitarian efforts by groups like Habitat for Humanity, the Red Cross, and Doctors Without Borders can invoke a powerful response through even the simplest of photos. While it can be hard to put yourself in a position to get the images, there are countless photo essay examples to serve as inspiration for your photo essay project.

How to Create a Photo Essay

There is no singular way to create a photo essay. As it is, ultimately, and artistic expression of the photographer, there is no right, wrong, good, or bad. However, like all stories, some tell them well and those who do not. Luckily, as with all things, practice does make perfect. Below, we’ve listed some basic steps outlining how to create a photo essay

Steps To Create A Photo Essay

Choose Your Topic – While some photo essayists will be able to “happen upon” a photo story and turn it into something compelling, most will want to choose their photo essay topics ahead of time. While the genres listed above should provide a great starting place, it’s essential to understand that photo essay topics can cover any event or occasion and any span of time

Do Some Research – The next step to creating a photo essay is to do some basic research. Examples could include learning the history of the area you’re shooting or the background of the person you photograph. If you’re photographing a new event, consider learning the story behind it. Doing so will give you ideas on what to look for when you’re shooting.  

Make a Storyboard – Storyboards are incredibly useful tools when you’re still in the process of deciding what photo story you want to tell. By laying out your ideas shot by shot, or even doing rough illustrations of what you’re trying to capture, you can prepare your photo story before you head out to take your photos.

This process is especially important if you have little to no control over your chosen subject. People who are participating in a march or protest, for instance, aren’t going to wait for you to get in position before offering up the perfect shot. You need to know what you’re looking for and be prepared to get it.

Get the Right Images – If you have a shot list or storyboard, you’ll be well-prepared to take on your photo essay. Make sure you give yourself enough time (where applicable) and take plenty of photos, so you have a lot from which to choose. It would also be a good idea to explore the area, show up early, and stay late. You never know when an idea might strike you.

Assemble Your Story – Once you develop or organize your photos on your computer, you need to choose the pictures that tell the most compelling photo story or stories. You might also find some great images that don’t fit your photo story These can still find a place in your portfolio, however, or perhaps a completely different photo essay you create later.

Depending on the type of photographer you are, you might choose to crop or digitally edit some of your photos to enhance the emotions they invoke. Doing so is completely at your discretion, but worth considering if you feel you can improve upon the naked image.

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Best Photo Essays Tips And Tricks

Before you approach the art of photo essaying for the first time, you might want to consider with these photo essay examples some techniques, tips, and tricks that can make your session more fun and your final results more interesting. Below, we’ve compiled a list of some of the best advice we could find on the subject of photo essays. 

⬥ Experiment All You Want 

You can, and should, plan your topic and your theme with as much attention to detail as possible. That said, some of the best photo essay examples come to us from photographers that got caught up in the moment and decided to experiment in different ways. Ideas for experimentation include the following: 

Angles – Citizen Kane is still revered today for the unique, dramatic angles used in the film. Though that was a motion picture and not photography, the same basic principles still apply. Don’t be afraid to photograph some different angles to see how they bring your subject to life in different ways.

Color – Some images have more gravitas in black in white or sepia tone. You can say the same for images that use color in an engaging, dynamic way. You always have room to experiment with color, both before and after the shoot.

Contrast – Dark and light, happy and sad, rich and poor – contrast is an instantly recognizable form of tension that you can easily include in your photo essay. In some cases, you can plan for dramatic contrasts. In other cases, you simply need to keep your eyes open.

Exposure Settings – You can play with light in terms of exposure as well, setting a number of different moods in the resulting photos. Some photographers even do random double exposures to create a photo essay that’s original.

Filters – There are endless post-production options available to photographers, particularly if they use digital cameras. Using different programs and apps, you can completely alter the look and feel of your image, changing it from warm to cool or altering dozens of different settings.

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If you’re using traditional film instead of a digital camera, you’re going to want to stock up. Getting the right shots for a photo essay usually involves taking hundreds of images that will end up in the rubbish bin. Taking extra pictures you won’t use is just the nature of the photography process. Luckily, there’s nothing better than coming home to realize that you managed to capture that one, perfect photograph. 

⬥ Set the Scene 

You’re not just telling a story to your audience – you’re writing it as well. If the scene you want to capture doesn’t have the look you want, don’t be afraid to move things around until it does. While this doesn’t often apply to photographing events that you have no control over, you shouldn’t be afraid to take a second to make an OK shot a great shot. 

⬥ Capture Now, Edit Later 

Editing, cropping, and digital effects can add a lot of drama and artistic flair to your photos. That said, you shouldn’t waste time on a shoot, thinking about how you can edit it later. Instead, make sure you’re capturing everything that you want and not missing out on any unique pictures. If you need to make changes later, you’ll have plenty of time! 

⬥ Make It Fun 

As photographers, we know that taking pictures is part art, part skill, and part performance. If you want to take the best photo essays, you need to loosen up and have fun. Again, you’ll want to plan for your topic as best as you can, but don’t be afraid to lose yourself in the experience. Once you let yourself relax, both the ideas and the opportunities will manifest.

⬥ It’s All in The Details 

When someone puts out a photographic essay for an audience, that work usually gets analyzed with great attention to detail. You need to apply this same level of scrutiny to the shots you choose to include in your photo essay. If something is out of place or (in the case of historical work) out of time, you can bet the audience will notice.

⬥ Consider Adding Text

While it isn’t necessary, a photographic essay can be more powerful by the addition of text. This is especially true of images with an interesting background story that can’t be conveyed through the image alone. If you don’t feel up to the task of writing content, consider partnering with another artist and allowing them tor bring your work to life.

Final Thoughts 

The world is waiting to tell us story after story. Through the best photo essays, we can capture the elements of those stories and create a photo essay that can invoke a variety of emotions in our audience.

No matter the type of cameras we choose, the techniques we embrace, or the topics we select, what really matters is that the photos say something about the people, objects, and events that make our world wonderful.

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Pictorial Writing Examples: Visual Storytelling Mastery

In the realm of storytelling, pictorial writing emerges as a captivating fusion of artistry and narrative ingenuity. This curated collection of pictorial writing examples beckons you to explore the diverse and enriching world of visual narratives.

From the echoes of historical chronicles to the reflections of contemporary issues, each example serves as a testament to the profound impact that arises from the harmonious integration of visuals and storytelling.

What is Pictorial Writing?

Pictorial writing, synonymous with visual storytelling, is an expressive narrative form reliant on a sequence of images to unfold a story, elicit emotions, and communicate information. 

Rooted in the early 20th century, luminaries like Lewis Hine pioneered this medium by documenting the stark realities of child labor, propelling pictorial writing into a potent conduit for journalistic and artistic expression.

Key Elements of Pictorial Writing

Pictorial essays, characterized by a series of images crafting a cohesive narrative or conveying specific information, seamlessly blend visuals and text. This format allows for diverse storytelling, encompassing chronological narratives and capturing singular moments united by a common thematic thread.

Crafting Compelling Pictorial Essays

 Design Techniques:

• Scrollytelling Images: Foster viewer engagement by smoothly transitioning between photos overlaid with text, offering a dynamic approach to presenting visual narratives;
• Scroll Speed and Progress Bars: Enhance user experience by varying scroll speeds and incorporating progress bars, preventing content fatigue and guiding readers seamlessly through the essay;
•  Image Comparison Slider: Showcase transformations through an interactive image comparison slider, allowing viewers to explore before-and-after visuals;
• Clickable Image Hotspots: Maximize screen space with clickable hotspots, providing additional information and enhancing the overall storytelling experience;
• Image Carousels: Facilitate interactive navigation with horizontally navigable image carousels, creating an engaging and immersive storytelling experience.

 Best Practices for Design:

• Knowing Your Story: Ensure clarity and coherence by identifying the main points you want to visually convey in your pictorial essay;
• Diverse Shot Selection: Sustain viewer interest by incorporating varied angles, close-ups, and compositions, steering clear of monotony;
• Selecting the Best Images: Prioritize relevance over aesthetics, ensuring each photo contributes meaningfully to the narrative;
• Audience Consideration:Tailor your style and tone to the target demographic, resonating effectively with the intended audience;
• Maintaining Momentum: Employ scroll-triggered transitions, animations, and interactivity to captivate viewers, ensuring sustained engagement throughout the essay.

Pictorial Writing Examples: From Egmont to Taranaki 

Immerse yourself in the compelling Vev-built pictorial essay, “From Egmont to Taranaki,” where personal narratives intertwine with historical lessons. Animated effects and scrollytelling techniques elevate the visual journey, creating a captivating exploration.

Food for Thought

Offering a global lens on food production, “Food for Thought” utilizes fixed image parallax scrolling and hotspots to provide a comprehensive view of people, landscapes, and processes. This example exemplifies the potential for depth and engagement within pictorial storytelling.

Witnesses to History Keepers of Memory

The Montreal Holocaust Museum’s interactive creation delves into the lives of Holocaust survivors, utilizing hover-triggered animations and a thoughtful narrative structure to convey a powerful message. This example demonstrates the impactful potential of visual storytelling.

Hakai Autonomous Ocean

Delve into the oceanic realm with “Hakai Autonomous Ocean,” a single-page essay showcasing scrollytelling images and image comparison sliders. Narrating the story of a malfunctioning $150,000 robot beneath the sea, this example immerses the audience in a dramatic and engaging experience.

Moma Strange Brew

Unveiling the creation of John Klines’ art installation, “Skittles,” this essay employs humor and satire to explore consumerism. The step-by-step visual journey is complemented by fade-ins and interactive elements, showcasing the potential for creativity within the pictorial writing format.

Documenting UNICEF’s humanitarian efforts through photographer Jan Grarup, this pictorial essay reveals the organization’s Denmark warehouse and its impact in various countries. The inclusion of a scroll progress bar aids navigation, providing a seamless and informative visual journey.

The Guardian

“Slippery slope? Alpine tourism in the face of climate crisis” delves into the interplay between climate change and the Alps. Image comparison sliders showcase the region in both winter and other seasons, maximizing screen space for impactful visuals and fostering a deeper understanding of global issues.

The Naija Story

Divided into sections covering politics, technology, and entertainment, “The Naija Story” effectively utilizes photo essays to highlight Nigeria’s history. Scroll-triggered animations and connecting lines simplify the narrative for an artistic yet easily comprehensible presentation, making history accessible through visual storytelling.

Ukrainian Ballerina Uprooted by War Flies High Again

A poignant piece from Reuters, this essay chronicles the journey of ballet dancer Ganna Muromtseva, seamlessly blending writing and photos. The use of fade-ins and text overlays adds a dynamic touch to the visual storytelling, providing a personal and emotional insight into the subject’s life.

Creating Stunning Pictorial Essays with Vev

 Vev stands as a creative powerhouse, offering a myriad of tools to bring pictorial essays to life. Image comparison sliders, carousels, scroll animations, and other pre-built elements empower storytellers, eliminating the need for complex coding.

Features: Image Comparison Sliders, Carousels, Scroll Animations

Vev’s user-friendly interface allows journalists, designers, and publishers to seamlessly integrate dynamic elements into their visual content. Image comparison sliders showcase transformations, carousels enable interactive navigation, and scroll animations enhance the overall storytelling experience. With Vev, the creative possibilities of visual storytelling are boundless.

Conclusion 

The art of pictorial writing serves as a beacon for storytellers navigating the complex digital landscape. The convergence of visual aesthetics and narrative impact, coupled with meticulous design techniques and best practices, unveils the true potential of this unique medium.

Whether documenting historical events, unraveling global issues, or presenting personal narratives, pictorial essays offer a distinctive and engaging avenue for storytelling. 

With the innovative capabilities of tools like Vev, storytellers can unleash their creativity, ensuring their narratives not only stand out but resonate deeply in a visually saturated digital realm.

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17 Awesome Photo Essay Examples You Should Try Yourself

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If you’re looking for a photo essay example (or 17!), you’ve come to the right place. But what is the purpose of a photo essay? A photo essay is intended to tell a story or evoke emotion from the viewers through a series of photographs. They allow you to be creative and fully explore an idea. But how do you make one yourself? Here’s a list of photo essay examples. Choose one that you can easily do based on your photographic level and equipment.

Top 17 Photo Essay Examples

Here are some fantastic ideas to get you inspired to create your own photo essays!

17. Photograph a Protest

16. Transformation Photo Essays

15. Photograph the Same Place

14. Create a Photowalk

13. Follow the Change

12. Photograph a Local Event

11. Photograph an Abandoned Building

10. Behind the Scenes of a Photo Shoot

9. Capture Street Fashion

8. Landmark Photo Essay

7. Fathers & Children

6. A Day In the Life

5. Education Photo Essay

4. Fictitious Meals

3. Photograph Coffee Shops Using Cafenol

2. Photograph the Photographers

1. Capture the Neighbors

Photo essays tell stories. And there are plenty of amazingly interesting stories to tell! Photographing photo essays is a great way to practice your photography skills while having fun. You might even learn something! These photo essay examples are here to provide you with the inspiration to go out and tell your own stories through photos!

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How to Make a Photo Essay

Last Updated: September 27, 2023 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Heather Gallagher . Heather Gallagher is a Photojournalist & Photographer based in Austin, Texas. She runs her own photography studio named "Heather Gallagher Photography" which was voted Austin's Best Family Photographer and top 3 Birth Photographers in 2017, 2018, and 2019. Heather specializes in family Photojournalism and has over 15 years of experience documenting individuals, families, and businesses all over the world. Her clients include Delta Airlines, Oracle, Texas Monthly, and her work has been featured in The Washington Post and The Austin American Statesman. She is a member of the International Association of Professional Birth Photographers (IAPBP). There are 11 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 288,742 times.

Photo essays are an increasingly popular medium for journalists, bloggers, and advertisers alike. Whether you’re trying to show the emotional impact of a current news story or share your hobby with friends and family, images can capture your topic in a personal, emotional, and interesting way. Creating a photo essay can be as easy as choosing a topic, getting your images, and organizing the essay.

Things You Should Know

• Reflect long and hard on your topic, considering your audience, current events, and whether to go for a thematic or narrative approach.
• Create an outline, including your focus image, establishing shot, clincher, and other image details.
• When you finally take your photos, remember to take more photos than you think you need and don't be afraid to let the project change as you create it.

Finding Your Topic

• Offer a photo essay of your place of business as a training tool.
• Use a photo essay about your business as a sales or social tool by publishing it on your website or social media page.
• Create a how to photo essay to help others learn about your hobby, so they can take it up as well. [4] X Research source

• Thematic subjects are big ideas including things like local gun laws, at-risk youth, or welcoming home soldiers.
• Narrative essays can include a day in the life, how to tutorials, or progression series that show changes over time such as tracking a building project.
• If you have been given a commission or specific publication to work with, you may need to choose a topic that will fit a thematic or narrative approach as outlined by the publication. Make sure you are aware of any publication guidelines in advance.

Organizing Your Shoot

• Consider how difficult it will be to get permission to photograph your subjects. If you already have relationships established, it will be easier. If not, allow for extra time to get permission and/or waivers.
• Schools, daycares, and other places with kids typically have more regulations on who can be photographed and for what purposes. You’ll usually need to get parental approval, in addition to permission from those in charge. [7] X Research source

• Consider doing interviews with people involved prior to the shoot. Ask things like, “What’s the most interesting thing you do during this event?” or “How long have you been involved with this organization?”
• These interviews are also a great opportunity to ask for permission and get waivers.
• If you’re going to visit a job site, charitable event, or other large group activity, ask the person or persons in charge to explain what you’re doing to everyone before you arrive. [8] X Research source

Capturing Your Images

• Many new photographers stay away from high ISO shots because they allow more light through producing a “busy” image. However, these images are often easier to edit later as there’s more information to work with. [11] X Research source
• If it’s very bright in your location or you’ve set up artificial lighting, a low ISO is likely adequate, For darker areas, you’ll likely need to use a higher ISO.
• If you need one second to capture an image with a base ISO of 100, you’ll need one eighth of a second to capture with an ISO of 800. [13] X Research source

• Even snapping candid shots, which you may need to capture quickly, take a few moments to think about how objects are placed to make the most impact.
• Always think about how the main subject’s surroundings play into the overall image, and try to create different levels and points of interest.
• You can change composition as part of the editing process in some cases, so if you can’t line up the shot just right, don’t let it deter you from capturing the image you want. [14] X Research source

Organizing the Essay

• If you’re doing a day in the life photo essay about a frustrated person working in an office, an image of that person struggling to open the front door against the wind might be an apt focus shot.
• If your essay is about the process of building a home, your focus image may be something like a contractor and architect looking at blue prints with the framed up home in the background.
• If your essay is about a family reunion, the focus image may be a funny shot of the whole family making faces, pretending to be fighting, or a serious photo of the family posed together. Capture whatever seems natural for the family. [18] X Research source

• Regardless of essay type, you’ll need a focus image to grab attention.
• Use an overall shot to give context to your essay. Where is it, when is it happening, who’s involved, what’s going on, and why should someone be interested? The five “W’s” of journalism are a great way to determine what your overall shot should capture.
• Find your final image. This should be something provocative that asks your viewer to think about the topic.
• Between the focus and overall shot and ending image, include a series of images that move the viewer from the lead-in shots to its result. Use images that build in intensity or draw the viewers further into the essay.

• If the images aren’t telling the story, ask your friends to look at your other photos and ask, “I wanted this image to make this point. You got a different idea. Would any of these images make this point to you more clearly?”
• If the others like the images you’ve chosen, you may still want to ask them to look at your other photos and tell you if they think any of the images you didn’t include should be added in. They may see something you missed. [20] X Research source

• If you're commissioned to add photos to an essay, you should make sure images reflect the written word, but also add emotion and context the writing could not capture. For example, an essay on poverty may include an image of a child and parent living on the street could capture more emotional context.
• Captions should only include information the viewer could not derive from the photo itself. For instance, you can include a date, the subject’s name, or a statistic relevant to your subject in the caption.
• If you choose not to have any text or just a title and some introductory and/or closing words, make sure you convey all necessary information succinctly. [21] X Research source

Expert Q&A

• Be creative with your topics. However, something as simple as "things I like" will suffice so long as you stay creative. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• Make sure you're familiar with your camera. It will make the photo composition a lot easier. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• Don't get discouraged. It may take several tries to get the desired results in your photos. Thanks Helpful 1 Not Helpful 0

You Might Also Like

• ↑ http://digital-photography-school.com/5-photo-essay-tips/
• ↑ Heather Gallagher. Professional Photojournalist & Photographer. Expert Interview. 8 April 2020.
• ↑ http://improvephotography.com/30816/10-ideas-creative-photo-essays/
• ↑ http://www.apogeephoto.com/how-to-create-a-photo-essay/
• ↑ https://petapixel.com/how-to-create-a-photo-essay/
• ↑ http://photo.journalism.cuny.edu/week-5/
• ↑ http://clickitupanotch.com/2010/12/creating-a-photo-essay/
• ↑ https://photographylife.com/what-is-iso-in-photography
• ↑ https://wiredimpact.com/blog/how-to-make-a-photo-essay-nonprofit/
• ↑ http://digital-photography-school.com/5-tips-for-creating-a-photo-essay-with-a-purpose/
• ↑ https://www.format.com/magazine/resources/photography/how-to-make-photo-essay-examples

About This Article

To make a photo essay, start by selecting a subject that is easy to capture and that inspires you, like a friend or a family pet. Then, decide if you want to present your photo essay as thematic, which shows specific examples of a big idea, or narrative, with a beginning, middle, and end. Next, create an outline of your essay to determine which photos you’ll need, like an establishing shot. Finally, take your photos, select which images you want to use in your essay, and organize them according to your theme before adding text to explain the essay. To learn how to capture the best images, keep scrolling! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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45 Photo Essay Topics

Most academic writing assignments involve just that – writing. But in the case of a photo essay, the assignment becomes one of both writing and photography. A photo essay is simply an essay that uses images instead of (or in addition to) words to tell a story or make a point.

A good photo essay will capture your audience’s attention and tell a story that resonates with them on an emotional level. To create a successful photo essay, there are a few things you should keep in mind.

This detailed guide will walk you through the essential steps of creating a photo essay and provide you with 45 photo essay topics to get you started.

What Is a Photo Essay?

A photo essay is a written piece that uses images to tell a story or make a point. In other words, it’s an essay that depends primarily on visuals rather than text to communicate its message.

Photo essays are usually themed around a particular subject or topic and can be created for a variety of purposes. They can be used to:

• Tell a news story
• Raise awareness about an important issue
• Share a personal experience
• Document a place or event
• Highlight the work of a specific artist or photographer

No matter what the purpose of your photo essay is, there are a few key elements that should be included in order to impact the audience to the best degree.

What Makes a Good Photo Essay?

A good photo essay will have a clear focus, with each image adding something new to the story. It should also be structured to make sense so that the viewer can easily follow along and understand the point you’re trying to make.

When choosing images for your photo essay, be sure to select ones that are high quality and have a consistent theme or style. This will help create a cohesive story that is visually pleasing and easy to follow.

It’s also important to ensure that your images are appropriately captioned and credited, especially if you’re using someone else’s work. This ensures that your photo essay is both accurate and legal.

Steps for Creating a Photo Essay

Creating a photo essay is a process that requires time, patience, and careful planning. Follow these steps to create a successful photo essay:

1. Choose a topic or theme

The first step in creating a photo essay is to choose the topic or theme you want to focus on. This can be anything from a place, an event, or even a person. Once you’ve decided on your subject, it’s time to start brainstorming ideas for your essay.

2. Do your research

If you’re documenting a place or an event, it’s important to do your research beforehand. This will help you understand your subject’s background and give you a better idea of what to include in your essay.

3. Gather your material

Now it’s time to start gathering the material for your essay. This includes both images and text. Remember, if you’re using someone else’s photos, be sure to get their permission first.

4. Choose a format

There are a few different ways you can format your photo essay. The most common is to create a series of images that progress in a linear fashion, such as from left to right or top to bottom.

Another option is to arrange your images more abstractly, such as in a grid or collage. This can help to add visual interest and variety to your essay.

5. Edit your material

Once you have all of your material gathered, it’s time to start editing. This includes both choosing which images to use and writing the accompanying text.

For the images, you’ll want to select those that are the most visually appealing and that best support the story you’re trying to tell. As you edit, also be sure to crop and resize your images as needed.

For the text, you’ll want to write a brief introduction and conclusion, as well as captions for each of your images. The goal is to provide just enough context and information to help viewers understand what they’re seeing.

6. Design your essay

Now it’s time to start putting your photo essay together. If you’re using a linear format, begin by arranging your images in the order you want them to appear. Then, add the accompanying text.

If you’re using a more creative format, start by playing around with different ways to arrange your images. Then, add the text once you’ve settled on a design you like.

7. Finalize and Hand it in

Once you’ve designed your photo essay, it’s time to finalize it and hand it in. Be sure to proofread the text for any errors and check the images to ensure they’re properly captioned. It is highly recommended to use a professional printing service to print your photo essay to ensure the best possible quality.

Understanding how to create a photo essay is only half the battle. The other half is finding a topic that you’re passionate about that will also interest your audience. To help get you started, here are 45 ideas for photo essay topics:

Photo Essay Topics About Places

• Your hometown
• A nearby city or town
• A favorite vacation spot
• An interesting landmark
• A place from your childhood
• A hidden gem in your town
• The most beautiful place you’ve ever been
• The most interesting place you’ve ever been
• The strangest place you’ve ever been
• A place that is significant to you for personal reasons
• A place that is significant to your family
• A place with a lot of history
• A place that is in danger of disappearing

Photo Essay Topics About Events

• A sporting event
• A music festival
• A parade or procession
• A protest or demonstration
• An annual celebration in your town
• A once-in-a-lifetime event that you witnessed
• An event that had a significant impact on you
• An event that had a significant impact on your community
• An event that is widely considered to be positive
• An event that is widely considered to be negative
• A controversial event
• A natural disaster
• A man-made disaster

Photo Essay Topics About People

• The people in your neighborhood
• The people at your job
• Your family
• Your friends
• The elderly
• A group of people with a common interest or hobby
• A group of people from a different culture than your own
• A group of people who are disadvantaged or marginalized in some way
• A group of people who are often misunderstood
• Celebrities
• Politicians
• Everyday people

Photo Essay Topics About Concepts

A photo essay is an interesting assignment that can help you express your creativity while also teaching you how to pay attention to detail, tell a story, and edit images. If you follow the steps outlined in this article, you’ll be well on your way to creating a successful photo essay.

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The 25 Photos That Defined the Modern Age

A group of experts met to discuss the images that have best captured — and changed — the world since 1955.

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By M.H. Miller ,  Brendan Embser ,  Emmanuel Iduma and Lucy McKeon

• Published June 3, 2024 Updated June 4, 2024

This story contains graphic images of violence and death.

Let’s get this out of the way first: Of the dozens of photographers not represented here that a reasonable person might expect to have been included, the most conspicuous absentees include Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, Richard Avedon, Dawoud Bey, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Imogen Cunningham, Roy DeCarava, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton and Irving Penn. Putting together a list of the 25 most significant photographs since 1955 — both fine art photos and reportage — proved a difficult task for the panelists (even the chosen time frame was controversial). They were: the Canadian conceptual photographer Stan Douglas , 63; the Vietnamese American photographer An-My Lê , 64; the acting chief curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, Roxana Marcoci, 66; the American documentary photographer Susan Meiselas , 75; the American photographer Shikeith , 35; and Nadia Vellam, 51, T’s photo and video director. Each participant (including myself, the moderator, 36) submitted up to seven possible nominees for the list. We gathered at The New York Times Building on a morning last February (with Shikeith joining on video from a shoot in Los Angeles) to begin our deliberations.

We chose judges from the realms of both fine art and reportage because, increasingly, the line between the two has collapsed. The modern age has been defined by photographs — images that began their lives in newspapers or magazines are repurposed as art; art has become a vehicle for information. Therefore, it was important to us and our jurors that we not draw boundaries between what was created as journalism and what was created as art. What was important was that the photographs we chose changed, in some way, how we see the world.

The conversation naturally turned into a series of questions. Like how important was it for a photograph to have expanded the possibilities of the medium? And how much did it matter who took a photo and what their intentions were? The list that emerged is less concerned with a historical chronology or an accepted canon than it is with a set of themes that have been linked indelibly to the photographic medium since its inception: labor and activism; war; the self and the family. Intriguingly, beyond an image by Wolfgang Tillmans from the ’90s, fashion photography is largely absent. So, too, are many world historical events that have been captured in landmark photographs, including the assassination of JFK, the fall of the Berlin Wall and anything from the pandemic lockdown or the presidency of Donald Trump. There were just too many other photographs to consider.

The process of producing the final list was clearly not scientific. It was more of a debate among a certain group of people on a certain day and is best considered that way. At the end of nearly four hours, jittery from caffeine, the group stood before a pile of crumpled masterworks on the floor as we assembled our chosen 25 images on a conference table. Many of our questions weren’t resolved (indeed, are unresolvable), but the results — which aren’t ranked but rather presented in the order in which we discussed them — are nothing if not surprising. — M.H. Miller

The conversation has been edited and condensed.

M.H. Miller: I thought we should start by talking about the time frame we settled on, starting in 1955.

Stan Douglas: It’s an agenda.

Miller: A little bit. It certainly shows an American bias, so I apologize to our Canadian representative — 1955 is really the beginning of the American civil rights movement, an era from which a number of us nominated photographs, and photography was so important in just making people aware of what was going on in the country. An-My, you chose Robert Frank’s picture of a streetcar in New Orleans, taken that year.

1. Robert Frank, “Trolley — New Orleans,” 1955

Robert Frank used “Trolley — New Orleans” as the original cover of his influential photo book “The Americans,” first published in the United States in 1959. Frank, a Swiss émigré, spent two years traveling the States and capturing what he saw. In this photograph, two Black passengers sit at the rear of a New Orleans streetcar while four white passengers sit at the front; all look out from a row of windows, the mullions between them emphasizing their strict separation. At the time of its publication, “The Americans” was considered by several critics to be a pessimistic, angry portrait of the country. (The magazine Popular Photography famously called it a “warped” and “wart-covered” depiction “by a joyless man.”) Many more viewers and artists, however, found inspiration in the direct, unromantic style pioneered by Frank, whose outsider status likely let him view America’s contradictions from a clarifying distance. He had “sucked a sad poem out of America onto film,” as Jack Kerouac wrote in an introduction to the book. This image, shot in the months before the Montgomery bus boycotts made segregation a national debate, showed America to itself, as if for the first time. The faces in the photographs, Kerouac wrote, don’t “editorialize or criticize, or say anything but ‘this is the way we are in real life.’” — Emmanuel Iduma

An-My Lê: I tried to look for things that spoke to me, but also spoke to a generation.

Douglas: If I had to choose a civil rights image, I wouldn’t choose this one. Great photograph. But something happening on the street would be more appropriate, I think, like the dog attacking protesters , or the photo with the firemen .

Roxana Marcoci: But this was the cover of “The Americans,” and it does happen in the street, actually. I think that what you’re saying is, it’s not a photojournalistic image.

Douglas: The most important thing to me is: does a photograph reveal a new reality, or reveal something that’s been hidden previously? I think that’s a key criterion for making it significant. What impact on the world can that image have? A European might not have recognized that this was happening in the U.S. Maybe a lot of Americans in the North didn’t realize this was happening in the U.S. And I love this photograph, so I’m very happy to keep it.

2. David Jackson, Mamie Till and Gene Mobley Standing Before the Body of Emmett Till at a Chicago Funeral Home, 1955

Mamie Till fixes her eyes on her dead son, as her fiancé, Gene Mobley, holding her, stares at the viewer. Emmett Till , 14, is laid out on a cot in a Chicago funeral home, his face disfigured and bloated. His mother allowed the photojournalist David Jackson to take this picture in September 1955, a few days after two white men had abducted and murdered Till while he was visiting relatives in Mississippi. Quickly acquitted by an all-white jury, the men would go on to sell their confession to Look magazine for $4,000. When this photo was published, first in Jet magazine and then in The Chicago Defender and other Black newspapers, it incited an unprecedented level of outrage in America over racial violence; Jet had to reprint the Sept. 15, 1955, issue in which it appeared because of high demand. For the same reason Mamie Till let this picture be taken, she chose to keep her son’s coffin open during the funeral. “The murder of my son has shown me that what happens to any of us, anywhere in the world, had better be the business of us all,” she said. An estimated 100,000 people came to view his body. Jackson’s photograph was a call to action for many, including Rosa Parks, who said she thought of Till when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus later that same year. — E.I.

Miller: I feel like you can’t have this conversation, especially with the year we designated as the starting point, without talking about Emmett Till. There’s the devastating series of photographs of Till’s funeral. But there’s also the one from the trial — when Till’s great-uncle is identifying the men who murdered his nephew. The judge didn’t allow that photographer, Ernest C. Withers, to shoot in the courtroom. So it’s a miracle that the picture exists, and that it’s composed as well as it is when it had to be taken in secret. And it’s a moment where you saw a larger shift taking place. Up to that point in the South, a Black witness identifying white defendants in court was unheard-of.

Marcoci: The picture [of his body] was also about the power of the witness, right?

Susan Meiselas: Oh, for sure. Mamie Till and her insistence on an open coffin: how brave an act that was. And it ran in Jet and moved around the world.

Douglas: The issue for me with the trial picture is that it needs a paragraph to explain why we’re looking at it.

Marcoci: The courtroom was a travesty. They went free. But this, Mamie Till with her son, created a generation of Black activists.

Shikeith: I grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Philadelphia, and when we were learning about Black history in the fourth or fifth grade, that picture was brazenly shared with students. It was probably the first time I learned how powerful a photograph can be in having real material change in the world. It’s an image that I’ve lived with my [whole] life, and that’s impacted how I viewed the world and racism and its violence. It scares me. But, you know, it’s the truth. The truth can be very scary for a lot of us.

Miller: Shikeith, you also selected this Gordon Parks photograph, which is one of two color images the group nominated from the 1950s and ’60s — and the second was taken from outer space.

3. Gordon Parks, “Department Store, Mobile, Alabama,” 1956

In 1956, Life magazine sent Gordon Parks to document the effects of Jim Crow segregation laws in the American South through the experiences of one extended family in Mobile, Ala. Parks was one of the few Black photojournalists to work for an establishment magazine at the time, and was known especially for his fashion photography, as is easily apparent from this image. For Life, he photographed everyday scenes — a church choir singing or children drinking from water fountains — intentionally capturing signs reading “White Only” or “ Lots for Colored .” “Department Store, Mobile, Alabama” (1956) was shot for the Life story, which ran at 12 pages under the title “The Restraints: Open and Hidden” but, for unknown reasons, it didn’t make the final edit, and it wasn’t published until 2012, when a five-volume collection of Parks’s photographs was released. “Department Store” has since become a belated icon, one of the most memorable images in a career that also includes directing the 1971 film “Shaft.” Notable most of all for its vivid color, a startling contrast to the predominantly black-and-white imagery from the civil rights era, the portrait depicts Joanne Thornton Wilson, then age 27, dressed in an ice-blue, A-line cocktail dress, with her young niece, Shirley Anne Kirksey, standing beneath the red neon “Colored Entrance” sign in front of a department store. Wilson’s upright posture and outward gaze — peering in the opposite direction of the sign’s blue arrow — subtly signify defiance. But there’s an intimacy and vulnerability in the picture, too. In 2013, Wilson, who went on to become a high school teacher, told the art historian Maurice Berger that she regretted that the strap of her slip had visibly fallen. “Dressing well made me feel first class,” she said. “I wanted to set an example.” She had set an example, of course, which Parks had recorded with such clarity: Wilson also told Berger that she refused to take her niece through the “colored” entrance. — Brendan Embser

Shikeith: I think what’s beautiful about this image is that it’s brilliantly composed — it uses beauty to draw you into a poignant moment in history, becoming a record of the Jim Crow laws in the Southern U.S. I tried to pick photographs that had an influence on me, and that I thought my mother would recognize, to indicate their influence on people who might operate outside of art history conversations. It [can be used as] a tool for educating even the youngest of minds about what marginalized communities went through.

Marcoci: I think that’s a great point: the pedagogical nature of photographs. In this picture, there’s the elegance and grace of these two figures, and then the ugliness of that “Colored Entrance” sign. There’s such a tension between them.

Nadia Vellam: You don’t immediately realize the context because you’re so attracted to the two people in the image. It asks you to spend more time looking.

Douglas: It’s quite an exquisite picture. It’s basically an X, which draws your eye into the center, which then takes you to that woman’s gaze outside the frame. Inside the frame, there’s something quite sweet. But outside — both beyond that door and out in the world that’s made that door — there’s something quite ugly.

4. Alberto Korda, “Guerrillero Heroico (Che Guevara),” 1960

Alberto Korda, a favored photographer of Fidel Castro, captured this image of a 31-year-old Che Guevara by chance during a funeral in Havana in 1960 to honor the victims of a freighter explosion. Guevara, at the time the president of the National Bank of Cuba, happened to move into Korda’s line of sight while Castro was giving a speech. His expression is one of restrained anger; the Cuban government accused the United States of being responsible for the tragedy, which it denied. Five years later, Guevara resigned from Castro’s cabinet and joined revolutionary causes abroad, including in Congo and Bolivia, where he led guerrillas in a failed coup attempt. Korda’s photo wasn’t widely published until after Guevara’s execution by Bolivian soldiers in 1967, when posters, murals and eventually T-shirts emblazoned with Guevara’s face began to appear around the world. In the original portrait, he is flanked by another man and some palm fronds, but the reproductions are cropped to show just Guevara’s head. Korda’s image made Guevara into something more than a man, or even a famous revolutionary; he became a symbol for revolution itself. — E.I.

Miller: We have two pictures of Che Guevara to consider. Stan, you picked Che following his execution , and Susan, you picked the more famous portrait of him by Alberto Korda. It’s in every college dorm.

Marcoci: It’s in every tattoo parlor.

Douglas: They’re both propaganda images. One is the revolutionary looking to the future, which we’ve seen in everything from Soviet realist paintings to Obama posters. So, in many ways, a cliché, even though it’s had this huge impact. The image of Che dead [which was taken by the Bolivian photographer Freddy Alborta] is both iconic in that it’s like [an Andrea] Mantegna [1431-1506] painting of the dead Christ [“ Lamentation Over the Dead Christ ,” circa 1480], but also as evidence, on the part of the people who killed him, that the guy is dead. It’s just such a weird photograph: the officer on the right who’s poking at Che’s body to prove he’s just a human. Just mortal. And it somehow seemed like the end of the export of revolution from Cuba, which very much shut down after Che’s death.

Meiselas: And then he’s resurrected as a tattoo.

5. Diane Arbus, “Boy With a Straw Hat Waiting to March in a Pro-War Parade, N.Y.C., 1967”

The boy in “Boy With a Straw Hat” doesn’t look like a typical Arbus subject. Wearing a prim collared shirt, bow-tie and boater hat, with one American flag at his side and another, much smaller one twisted into a bow on his lapel, the thin-lipped paradegoer seems like the paragon of anodyne conservatism. He’s nothing like the cross-dressers, carnival entertainers, nudists and others relegated to the margins of society that fascinated Arbus, whose work prompted one of the more protracted debates on the ethics of photography, as her images were so often said to skirt the lines of voyeurism and exploitation. Yet his steady gaze prompts a similar sense of unease in the viewer, as does the small pin on his jacket that reads Bomb Hanoi. “Boy With a Straw Hat” was the cover image of Artforum’s May 1971 issue, published two months before Arbus’s death by suicide at age 48. In 1972, when her posthumous MoMA retrospective drew record crowds, the art critic Hilton Kramer refuted the idea that she was merely capturing her subjects for the sake of spectacle; he argued that she collaborated with the people she photographed, and that that act of participation provided dignity — or at least authenticity — especially for those individuals who are shunned or otherwise invisible. Arbus herself once said that the “best thing is the difference. I get to keep what nobody needs.” — B.E.

Miller: A number of us nominated Diane Arbus photos.

Douglas: [I picked] the sitting room in Levittown [“ Xmas Tree in a Living Room in Levittown, L.I., 1962 ”], which is one of those suburbs created in the postwar period that people could buy [homes in] with their G.I. Bill money, in which Black people couldn’t live. It’s a case of there [being] something outside the image, which is very powerful: The construction of this new suburban reality, while Emmett Till’s being killed.

Marcoci: I chose the “Giant” [“ A Jewish Giant at Home With His Parents in the Bronx, N.Y., 1970 .”], because this was one of the first pictures where I was really thinking, “Who is that person? What would it be like to be him?”

Meiselas: One of the things that photographs do is make us emotional. Some of Arbus’s most memorable pictures are the ones that make you feel more than think.

Vellam: I’d vote for “Giant” just because it spawned so many people’s idea of portraiture: Katy Grannan, Deana Lawson, Larry Sultan. Like this idea of going into a place — in her case, middle-class suburbia — that you may not even have spent any time in otherwise. I feel like that became its own genre: There’s so much photography that has come out of her idea of going into people’s homes.

Marcoci: If I were to choose just one Arbus, I’d probably choose “Boy With a Straw Hat”: A portrait of an individual that’s this very interesting collective portrait of America, too. There’s this tension between the innocent face and then those buttons: “God Bless America” and “Bomb Hanoi.”

Shikeith: He’s sort of the archetype for the Proud Boys. You can see that smirk on his face.

Meiselas: There were pictures from the R.N.C. [Republican National Convention] four years ago that looked so much like this.

Miller: Stan and An-My both nominated a very different kind of photograph from the Vietnam War era: Malcolm Browne’s picture of Thích Quảng Đức’s self-immolation.

6. Malcolm Browne, the Self-Immolation of the Buddhist Monk Thích Quảng Đức in Saigon, 1963

The AP reporter Malcolm Browne was among the only photojournalists on the scene when the monk Thích Quảng Đức set himself on fire in 1963 in Saigon as an act of protest against the South Vietnamese government’s persecution of the Buddhist majority. As flames engulfed Quảng Đức, hundreds of monks surrounded him, mourning while he burned. The photo, sent out as soon as possible on a commercial flight to reach the AP’s offices, was published on front pages internationally the following morning. When President John F. Kennedy saw it, he reportedly exclaimed, “Jesus Christ!” and then ordered a review of his administration’s Vietnam policy. (He would later say, “No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.”) Browne won the Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for the photograph, which also contributed to the collapse of support for the South Vietnamese president Ngô Đình Diệm, who was assassinated in a coup that year. President Kennedy was assassinated just a few weeks later, and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, would escalate the war. Browne’s photograph, which is newly resonant today, enshrined the act of self-immolation as the most extreme form of protest. — Lucy McKeon

Lê: I think it’s one of the most incredible monuments that exists as a photograph. [It documents] an extraordinary act of sacrifice for a cause. These days, you see [some] people protesting, and it’s all about their egos. And here, there’s no ego. It’s one of the few pictures I know that’s so violent and peaceful at the same time.

Douglas: He was there for five minutes, apparently, burning, and just didn’t flinch, didn’t say a word. This is what you do when you have no other recourse, when you feel the suppression is so severe that this is the only way you can get your statement heard.

Meiselas: It makes me think of the Napalm Girl, as well [ Nick Ut’s 1972 image of Kim Phuc Phan Thi , age 9, fleeing a napalm attack in the village of Trảng Bàng]. That moment impacted a generation. The question is, which one mobilized us further?

Lê: The Napalm Girl picture, for me, represents the notion that all Vietnamese are victims of war. I started watching war movies in college, and every time the word “Vietnam” comes up, that is the image that people have in their mind. I think the monk speaks to [something] beyond himself. He’s not a victim.

7. NASA/William A. Anders, “Earthrise,” 1968

On Christmas Eve 1968, aboard Apollo 8 during its pioneering orbit of the moon, William A. Anders photographed the Earth “rising” above the lunar horizon. The picture was the first of its kind — and it was also unplanned. Anders, the youngest of the three astronauts on the spacecraft, had been tasked with taking photographs of the moon’s craters, mountains and other geological features. He spontaneously decided, however, to include Earth in the frame when he noticed how beautiful it was. “Here was this orb looking like a Christmas tree ornament, very fragile,” Anders would recall in a NASA oral history. “And yet it was our home.” His first shot was in black and white. For the next, he switched to color, which emphasized the contrast between the moon’s gray surface and the planet’s blue-green vibrancy. “Earthrise” was the first image most of humanity saw of the planet we live on, a nature photo like none before it and a reminder of how small our world really is, in comparison with the rest of the universe. As Joni Mitchell would sing of the image, on 1976’s “ Refuge of the Roads ”: “And you couldn’t see a city on that marbled bowling ball/Or a forest or a highway/Or me here least of all. …” — E.I.

Lê: “Earthrise” isn’t the first image of the Earth seen from space. There were earlier low-resolution ones in the ’40s , made from unmanned missiles or whatever. There was one made on Apollo 4, in 1967 . But I think this one, taken by a crew member on Apollo 8 the next year with a Hasselblad, is important because it’s humbling: seeing the Earth in relationship to the Moon, and thinking about us not being the only people on this Earth. Perhaps this is when we started thinking about how we should take care of our home.

Miller: Stan, you nominated a later photo, “ Sunset on Mars ” (2005).

Douglas: I’ve always had this knee-jerk response to Apollo being American propaganda somehow, part of the arms race — who’s going to get [to the Moon] first, the U.S. or the Russians? And once the U.S. got there, they lost interest. It wasn’t really about exploration, but dominance. This image on Mars is something quite extraordinary, because in effect, the camera is a prosthesis. It’s both a very artificial one and a human one. We actually extend our vision through it.

8. Ernest C. Withers, “I Am a Man: Sanitation Workers Strike, Memphis, Tennessee,” 1968

In the last weeks of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. took part in a protest of Black sanitation workers striking for safer conditions and decent wages in Memphis, Tenn. In a speech, King emphasized the connection between the United States’ civil rights battle and the struggles of poor and disenfranchised people worldwide, a message that resonated with the crowd. Their protest signs bore the phrase “I Am a Man,” a stark acknowledgment of all the ways this most basic fact was disrespected. “We were going to demand to have the same dignity and the same courtesy any other citizen of Memphis has,” one of the participants, James Douglas, recalled in a 1978 documentary titled “I Am a Man.” The defining photo of the strike was taken by the Black photojournalist Ernest C. Withers, a Memphis native who previously shot the trial of Emmett Till’s killers, and also made famous images of the Montgomery bus boycott , the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. Withers’s picture became the official record of King’s last major civil rights action. Years later, however, Withers’s own story was revealed to have been more complicated. Like King, the photographer drew the attention of the F.B.I. Unlike King, he became a paid informant. Yet he continued to produce some of the most iconic images of the movement: On April 4, 1968, less than a week after taking this photo, Withers was on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, photographing the blood stain at the scene of King’s assassination. — L.M.

Shikeith: I think I first saw this image around the time the Million Man March was happening [in 1995]. I have a greater understanding of manhood [now] and how much of it I want to align with, and how much I don’t. But I understand how vital the need to identify as a man was in that moment.

Meiselas: I love the contrast of “I am a man,” singular, and “I am a collective.” It’s just all there: perfect distance, perfect composition. Whether or not Withers was working for the F.B.I. …

Douglas: Was he?

Meiselas: Yeah.

Douglas: And his role was to just …

Meiselas: Report on his fellow men. They paid him to spy on his colleagues. It’s a dark story. But let’s not go there.

9. Blair Stapp, Huey Newton, Black Panther Minister of Defense, 1968

In the summer of 1968, outside of the Alameda County Courthouse in Oakland, Calif., where Huey P. Newton stood trial for the murder of a police officer, supporters held up posters of him that instantly became synonymous with the Black Panther Party. The year before, Newton, the party’s co-founder and Minister of Defense, had collaborated with fellow Panther Eldridge Cleaver and the photographer Blair Stapp to stage a portrait of himself in a black leather jacket and a tipped beret, holding a shotgun in one hand and a spear in the other. He’s seated on a rattan peacock chair that recalls chairs woven by inmates in the United States-colonized Philippines decades earlier. Its oval back piece frames Newton’s head like an oversize halo. Two Zulu warrior shields are propped against the wall. Stapp’s portrait and the peacock chair itself have since become an enduring symbol of Black Power. Michelle Obama sat in one for her 1982 prom portrait . Melvin Van Peebles recreated the photograph in his 1995 film “Panther.” The visual artist Sam Durant memorialized Newton in bronze in 2004 , and Henry Taylor painted it in 2007 . After two hung juries, the murder charges against Newton were dropped in 1971. For him, the struggle was about survival — or as he put it, “survival pending revolution.” — B.E.

Shikeith: I was trying to think of images that my grandmothers revered in a way. I think this is one of those images that exists in a lot of Black domestic spaces as a symbol for strength and determination. And it has this royal demeanor that’s been continuously emulated in Black photographic practice, whether amateur or professional.

Marcoci: The beret is almost [like] Che’s.

Shikeith: You can see people replicating this pose on the wicker chair throughout Black portraiture in the ’80s and early ’90s. I’m really interested in photographs that’ve had a long-lasting effect on our daily lives.

10. W. Eugene Smith, “Tomoko in Her Bath,” 1972

In the Magnum photojournalist W. Eugene Smith’s picture of Tomoko Kamimura, 15, she is being bathed by her mother at their home, in Minamata, Japan. Kamimura had been born with a kind of mercury poisoning that would later come to be known as Minamata disease, caused by a chemical factory contaminating the city’s water and food supply for more than 30 years. Smith and his wife, the photographer and activist Aileen M. Smith, lived in Minamata in the early 1970s, taking thousands of photographs to document the toll of the disaster — 1,784 people died after contracting the disease and thousands were left with severe neurological and musculoskeletal disabilities. Images from the series were printed by Life magazine in 1972, and Kamimura’s portrait became, for a time, one of the most famous images in the world. Amid the public outcry, “rumors began to circulate through the neighborhood claiming that we were making money from the publicity,” Kamimura’s father, Yoshio, would later write, “but this was untrue — it had never entered our minds to profit from the photograph of Tomoko. We never dreamed that a photograph like that could be commercial.” The Chisso Corporation, which owned the factory, has paid damages to some 10,000 victims. Kamimura died in 1977, at the age of 21. Smith died the following year. Twenty years later, after a French TV network wanted to use the photograph, Aileen M. Smith transferred control of it to Kamimura’s family. They haven’t allowed the photograph to be reproduced since. — L.M.

Meiselas: Without this documentation by Eugene Smith, I don’t think Minamata and the mercury poisoning would ever have been confronted. So when you do choose to represent a victim, I hope it’s purposeful.

Douglas: I heartily agree. And it’s a beautiful image of a loving relationship between mother and daughter.

Vellam: Smith documented people, but he was also very conscious of what he was doing while he was documenting them. I think he took a very long time after he shot everyone to figure out what he even wanted to show from them.

Meiselas: He believed that they should be better understood.

11. Photo Archive Group, “Photographs From S-21: 1975-79”

Some photographs, taken in the darkest moments of history, end up saying very different things from what their creators intended — like the images that Stalin’s secret police took during the Great Purge, or the ones white spectators took of lynchings in the United States. One of the more extensive photographic records of an authoritarian regime comes from the Khmer Rouge army, which controlled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 and whose genocidal purges of minority groups and political opponents led to the murder of almost a quarter of the country’s population. Before killing most of its victims, the army took their portraits, in part to prove to leaders that the supposed enemies of the state were indeed being executed. Of the nearly 20,000 people sent between 1975 and 1979 to what was known as the S-21 death camp, the Khmer Rouge’s most notorious torture center, only about a dozen survived. In 1994, the American nonprofit organization Photo Archive Group cleaned and cataloged more than 5,000 photographs taken of prisoners before their executions. A selection of the images, known as “Photographs from S-21: 1975-79,” was published as a book called “The Killing Fields” in 1996 and shown at MoMA the following year. Who was the girl pictured here? What had she seen? It’s impossible to know. And yet the regime’s photographic record offers a way into humanizing and remembering the victims of one of the most ruthless atrocities of the 20th century. S-21 is now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, where a number of the images from “Photographs From S-21: 1975-1979” are on permanent display. — L.M.

Lê: So these pictures were found in an archive in Cambodia [in 1993]. After the Khmer Rouge took over [in 1975], they went on a rampage, killing teachers and anyone who they felt wasn’t one of theirs. The bodies were buried in different locations. But they photographed these people before killing them. There were thousands of these pictures.

Douglas: If you want to make them disappear, why do you document them?

Lê: But that’s the thing. It’s the banality of evil. It’s unconscionable, right? Civilians being just collateral damage in war. Perhaps there are other ways to speak about violence, and I think this [set of photographs] certainly does.

12. Cindy Sherman, “Untitled Film Stills,” 1977-80

Cindy Sherman was 23 when she began making her “Untitled Film Stills,” a series of 70 black-and-white staged self-portraits that explore stereotypes of women in film and mass media. As a student at Buffalo State College, where she originally studied painting, she became fascinated by performers such as Vito Acconci and Chris Burden, artists who put their own bodies center stage. Sherman also liked to dress up as stock characters for parties, purchasing clothes from flea markets and experimenting with cosmetics. In “Untitled Film Stills,” she plays the career girl, ingénue, librarian , mistress, femme fatale and runaway , alternately heartbroken, hung over, daydreaming or determined to escape a predator as though trapped in some film noir. But which film? That feeling of vague recognition was Sherman’s point, as well as that of other artists of the era experimenting with pictures from mass media, who would eventually be called the Pictures Generation, a name based on a 1977 exhibition curated by Douglas Crimp . They wanted viewers to almost recognize the images, so as to heighten the uncanny nature of their work. Sherman initially sold eight-by-ten prints from “Untitled Film Stills” for $50 out of a binder from her desk at her day job as a receptionist at the nonprofit gallery Artists Space in New York. Douglas Eklund, who organized a Pictures Generation exhibition in 2009, noted that the series “never ceases to astonish, as if Sherman knew how to operate all of the machinery of mass-cultural representation with one hand tied behind her back.” Her intuitive grasp of the self-portrait’s theatrical appeal, especially when that self could be manipulated — decades before anyone could have imagined camera filters on an iPhone — has kept “Untitled Film Stills” relevant ever since. — B.E.

Marcoci: There’s something about the “Untitled Film Stills.” It’s this relationship between still and moving images. Cindy Sherman has the capacity to encapsulate, in a single [work], a narrative. She calls on this pantheon of women’s roles from movies that we think we’ve seen, but none of them are based on an actual film still. There’s one [“Untitled Film Still #13,” 1978] where she looks like Brigitte Bardot in a head scarf from Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt” (1963), but she’s a librarian. She’s reaching for a book. She makes the Bardot type into an intellectual, which is [an agency] that most male Hollywood filmmakers of the time, or even a filmmaker like Godard, would not have given the real Bardot. She was able to see something about how we engage with mass media and tweak it.

Douglas: I’m not convinced about Sherman. [There’s] an art-world canonization of the work. How important was it? How influential? I don’t think it was that important or influential outside of a very small area.

Marcoci: On the other hand, if you ask people if they know about Sherman, they probably do.

Lê: They do. Many young women find Sherman’s work empowering.

Marcoci: I never thought that we would just be considering photojournalism.

Meiselas: No.

Douglas: I mean, looking at the art world, I would include Ed Ruscha’s “Every Building on the Sunset Strip” [1966].

13. Ed Ruscha, “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” 1966

As a teenager in Oklahoma City in the 1950s, Ed Ruscha delivered newspapers by bicycle daily along a two-mile route. He dreamed about making a model of all the buildings on his circuit, he later recalled in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, “like an architect standing over a table and plotting out a city.” After moving to Los Angeles for art school in 1956, Ruscha became obsessed with the city’s architecture, particularly on the Sunset Strip, that part of Sunset Boulevard that stretches for about two miles, like his old paper route, across West Hollywood. In 1966, Ruscha photographed both sides of the Strip by securing a motorized camera to the bed of a pickup truck. The result was “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” a nearly 25-foot accordion-fold, self-published artist’s book. Today, Ruscha is most famous for his text-based paintings, many of which reference corporate logos and advertising slogans, for which he is widely celebrated as postwar America’s answer to the Dadaist nonsense movement. But his photography shares with the paintings a repetitive, deadpan humor. In addition to the Sunset Strip, Ruscha photographed swimming pools, gas stations, parking lots and apartments, and collected the images into small books that provoked the ire of critics — and fellow photographers — who deemed the work lacking in style and meaning. (“Only an idiot would take pictures of nothing but the filling stations,” the photographer Jeff Wall once complained.) But what he created was a kind of time travel, a meticulous, obsessive visual cartography of a long-lost Los Angeles. He and his brother, Paul, still make the trip to photograph the street every couple of years. — B.E.

Marcoci: I love [Ed] Ruscha, and I think we’ve barely touched on conceptual photography. Obviously superimportant, but is he really the photographer that did so much for photography through that series?

Meiselas: I know what you mean. Of course, because the photographs came way early, we rediscovered them after he became famous for painting.

Miller: Well, he’s certainly not as famous as a photographer as some people on this list, but I don’t know if we need to get hung up on that.

Douglas: I think “Sunset Strip” was extraordinary. Ruscha produces photographs governed by a hard-core conceptual procedure. In the case of “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” the procedure is in the title and, in order to fulfill it, he had to make hundreds of stops along a Los Angeles street. But I also thought this was too inside the art world.

Miller: Maybe this is a good time to talk about Nan Goldin.

14. Nan Goldin, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” 1979-2004

Nan Goldin originally presented “Ballad,” named after a song from Bertolt Brecht’s satirical musical “The Threepenny Opera,” as a series of 35-millimeter slides shown by a carousel projector in bars and nightclubs and backed by an eclectic soundtrack — from Dean Martin to the Velvet Underground. Goldin’s visual diary is itself a bohemian opera of New York’s downtown counterculture, a community freed from convention yet abandoned many times over by society; it documents sex, addiction, beauty, violence, powerful friendship, the AIDS crisis and the joyful struggle to live beyond the limits of the mainstream. Friends were photographed doing the twist at a party or preparing to inject heroin. In “Nan One Month After Being Battered” (1984), a portrait of domestic abuse, the artist’s bloodshot eye meets the lens head-on. Goldin’s “Ballad” has since been credited with inspiring everything from selfie culture to the raw, diaristic aesthetic and saturated color now commonplace across social media and in fine art. Over the years, Goldin would revise and update the series, presenting it with new images and a different soundtrack, and it would become an ubiquitous presence in galleries and museums. But because the work has so thoroughly permeated the culture, it’s easy to overlook just how radical it was when it debuted. In “ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed ,” Laura Poitras’s 2022 documentary about Goldin, the photographer describes a resistance to her art in the ’80s, “especially from male artists and gallerists who said ‘This isn’t photography. Nobody photographs their own life.’ It was still a kind of outlier act.” — L.M.

Marcoci: We’re talking about an artist who’s very much engaged with youth culture, with the cultures that transgress gender binaries. Also with the ravages of a generation that takes drugs, that loves, that dies young. “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” is a ballad. It shows this group of people as images set to music.

Meiselas: It was radical, it was very impactful to the photographic medium. But here’s my question: Would we be choosing either Nan [Goldin] or Cindy Sherman if we didn’t know their names?

Marcoci: Did you watch the “Ballad”?

Meiselas: Of course. I watched it in 1985.

Marcoci: How many times?

Meiselas: How many times has she changed it?

Marcoci: But even that I like. You don’t need to choose one picture. It’s interesting for me when photography is not just a moment that’s frozen in time, when it has the capacity to change.

15. Wolfgang Tillmans, “Lutz, Alex, Suzanne & Christoph on Beach (B/W),” 1993

A slightly different, color image of the same people in “Lutz, Alex, Suzanne & Christoph on Beach (B/W)” was first published by i-D magazine in 1993 for an unconventional fashion story about camouflage. The German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans staged the scene in Bournemouth, England, where he’d attended art school the previous year, and captured a whorl of bodies in military fatigues, each person clasping another’s arm, thigh or chest, and all wearing camouflage patterns from different countries — a post-Cold War utopia. The black-and-white version was printed on color paper, which accounts for the warmth of its tone. On the beach, Lutz, Alex, Suzanne and Christoph appear as if from a scene in Charles and Ray Eames’s 1977 short film “Powers of Ten,” which zooms out from a sunny picnic into the farthest reaches of the universe. Tillmans’s photograph “seems to model something like chosen family,” says the curator Phil Taylor, who edited a collection of the artist’s interviews. The way Tillmans envisions family in this early portrait — as a tight embrace amid the implied violence of the outside world — is emblematic of the way he would go on to depict men kissing at gay nightclubs or activists at antiwar demonstrations, each a picture of solidarity against the odds. — B.E.

Lê: I think Wolfgang [Tillmans] captured youth culture — in magazines like i-D and The Face — at a time [the early ’90s] when young people were being captured in a different way: It was very clinical and idealized, and he just came out with this very real [take on] youth culture. The pictures were a little more grainy, and I think it [changed] the way young people are seen. My students always bring up his work. I think it’s a way to photograph your family and friends and turn them into real protagonists. And I see that influence as very long-lasting.

Marcoci: What’s interesting in this image is [that] it’s four friends on a beach, dressed in camouflage. Camouflage immediately makes you think of military uniforms, of obedience, of listening to orders. But in the techno culture of these clubs in the 1990s, it had become a symbol of individuality and freedom: the exact opposite of what the uniform means.

Meiselas: This image, if I didn’t know his name, I would’ve just turned the page.

Lê: I think we need a picture that speaks about youth. And I think even though this picture was made in ’93 …

Miller: … That’s still how young people are photographed today.

16. Lee Friedlander, “Boston,” 1986, From the Series “At Work,” 1975-95

Lee Friedlander is best known for photographing America’s social landscape, from mundane street scenes in the Midwest to nudes of Madonna that were taken in the late 1970s. Between 1975 and 1995, he created six series of photographs depicting employees at different types of workplaces, including Rust Belt factories, a telemarketing call center and a New York investment firm. One of these series, commissioned by the M.I.T. Museum and produced between 1985 and 1986, looks at office workers in the Boston area who used desktop computers for their jobs. At the time, this was a fairly new development, but one that Friedlander presciently recognized would come to define not just corporate life but humanity itself. His subjects are often seemingly oblivious — or indifferent — to the presence of the camera. Likewise, his camera often omits the computers themselves, the ostensible subject of his images. Instead, the workers, sitting at brightly lit desks, are pictured from the chest up, their detached expressions familiar to any of us as they sit engrossed in (or bored by) screens just out of frame. With this series Friedlander had tapped into the dark comedy of the mundane. His influence can be seen in a generation of younger photographers who seek to question everyday life — from Alec Soth to LaToya Ruby Frazier — and whose images would mostly be viewed on screens. — E.I.

Marcoci: I love this series.

Douglas: I love it, too, but I put this in out of guilt for not having more art people in here. It’s images of these people just engaged in the world around them.

Meiselas: In autonomous labor. I remember when I first saw this series of white-collar workers in front of machines.

Lê: No one had done that before.

17. LaToya Ruby Frazier, “The Last Cruze,” 2019

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s series “The Last Cruze,” named after the compact car made by General Motors, follows the 2019 closure of an auto plant in Lordstown, Ohio, that had been open since 1966. Over nine months, Frazier documented the impact one corporation can have on a community, which lost thousands of jobs. A selection of images from the series were first published in The New York Times Magazine in May 2019, and the work was later presented as a multimedia installation: More than 60 portraits and video interviews with union workers and their families were mounted to orange metal trusses at the Renaissance Society in Chicago. In the accompanying monograph, Frazier included essays by artists and critics as well as members of the local chapter of the United Auto Workers union. On its cover is this photograph, which she shot from a helicopter, showing a group of workers and their families protesting the plant’s abrupt shuttering and requesting a new product to work on. Other images show Lordstown residents in various states of mourning — wiping away tears or proudly displaying union memorabilia. Born in a Pennsylvania steel manufacturing town, Frazier embedded herself with the Ohio workers, producing one of the most detailed records of the gutting of America’s working class. “‘The Last Cruze’ is a workers’ monument,” she has said. “It is half-holy, half-assembly line.” — L.M.

Marcoci: LaToya Ruby Frazier is a true artist-activist. These workers were losing their pension plans, their health benefits, you name it. It’s a work that includes more than 60 pictures of union workers along with their testimonies, because she also did these interviews with them.

Miller: I think “The Last Cruze” might be the only complete photographic record we have of the impact that corporate decision-making has on a work force. GM skipped town, cut their costs and the people of Lordstown were left holding the bag. We have another picture, nominated by Susan, that also documents labor.

18. Sebastião Salgado, “Serra Pelada Gold Mine, State of Pará, Brazil,” 1986

One of the most striking aspects of Sebastião Salgado’s photographs of an open-air gold mine in Brazil is the scale. Several thousand men — their bodies hunched and fragile — are rendered miniature against the backdrop of a massive pit in the earth. In the photos, most of the miners are climbing into or out of that pit, holding tools or ferrying sacks up and down narrow ladders and steep slopes. In several shots, Salgado chose not to include the horizon within the frame; the viewer can’t see where the workers’ dangerous journey ends. The photographer, who was born in the state of Minas Gerais (which means “general mines”) in Brazil, spent 35 days at Serra Pelada, living alongside the miners while he took these photographs. When they were published in 1987 in The New York Times Magazine, they revealed a late-20th-century gold rush and the appalling conditions facing those at the bottom of it. In the nearly four decades since, Salgado has gone on to capture the burning oil wells in Kuwait, the genocide in Rwanda and the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Some critics have labeled him an “aesthete of misery,” using the plight of the poor and disenfranchised to make visually striking pictures. When these images are exhibited in a fine art context, their size is so massive, the sheer aesthetics of the imagery threaten to eclipse the act of documentation. But in a profile in The Guardian this year marking his 80th birthday, Salgado responded, “I came from the third world. When I was born, Brazil was a developing country. The pictures I took, I took from my side, from my world, from where I come from. … The flaw my critics have, I don’t. It’s the feeling of guilt.” — E.I.

Meiselas: The scale of what he presented to us at the time was really quite amazing.

Douglas: It was like, “Holy moly, that’s still going on?”

Meiselas: Exactly.

19. Stuart Franklin, an Unidentified Man Blocking a Column of Tanks in Tiananmen Square, 1989

On June 5, 1989, as a column of tanks rolled into formation on Chang’an Avenue bordering Tiananmen Square, the Magnum photographer Stuart Franklin watched from the sixth-floor balcony of the nearby Beijing Hotel. He was holed up there with several other foreign correspondents, who were all covering the weekslong protests, led by hundreds of thousands of unarmed students, against the Chinese Community Party. Two nights before, the People’s Liberation Army had cleared the area with force; the next morning, they prevented parents from looking for students lost in the fray, and the soldiers fired live rounds even as medics attempted to rush the injured to safety. (Thousands are thought to have been killed in the protests, although an official death toll has never been released.) Suddenly, around noon on the 5th, a young man in a white shirt and dark pants, holding shopping bags in his hands, approached the first tank. On the video footage, it attempts to maneuver around him. Like a matador taunting a bull, he flings his arms in fury and, when the tank turns back, the man jumps out again. Yet the dramatic photograph Franklin took, with five tanks and a destroyed bus in the frame, draws its power from its stillness, its potential energy. (Four other photographers are known to have captured the same scene, including Jeff Widener, whose tightly framed version for The Associated Press ran on the front page of The Times.) Authoritarian regimes cannot tolerate symbolic images of resistance and, while the Tank Man — whose identity has never been confirmed — became an inspiration for pro-democracy movements across the world, he was snuffed out from official Chinese memory. Today, image searches in China for “Tiananmen Square” only turn up cheerful pictures of a tourist destination. — B.E.

Douglas: Multiple photographers shot this image because they were all in the same corner of a hotel overlooking Tiananmen Square. They couldn’t really shoot anywhere else on the square. The first time I saw this scene, it was a video.

Meiselas: Right, there was a television camera. The stills are very different. And I don’t care whose image it is. I’m thinking about the man in front of the tank and what happens when one man stands up. And I love how this looks alongside Ernest Withers’s “I Am a Man.”

20. Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, “The Day Nobody Died,” 2008

In 2008, the artist duo Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin were embedded with the British Army in Afghanistan during a period that was, at the time, the deadliest week since the war began in 2001. They brought a lightproof box containing a roll of photographic paper, and, occasionally, exposed six-meter segments of the paper to the sun for 20 seconds at a time. They were creating photograms, which, as opposed to conventional war photographs, display the marks of their making but little else. The resulting works — 12 in total — set out “to create a kind of post-mortem of photojournalistic representation of conflict,” as the artists wrote when the work was first exhibited. They made these images on days when a BBC fixer was executed or a suicide attack killed nine Afghan soldiers. But they also made one on the day that the title refers to — a day with no fatalities. In a literal sense, there isn’t anything to see in the images except splashes of light as abstract as a blurry sonogram. When Broomberg and Chanarin arrived in Afghanistan, the war was in its seventh year and, by then, a surfeit of photographs depicting death and violence had long been circulating. There’s hardly consensus on what to leave out when depicting war, but there is some consensus on the need to bear witness. With their photograms, Broomberg and Chanarin found a new, unexpected, but no less emotional way of doing so. — E.I.

Miller: There were a lot of different kinds of images of war from the George W. Bush era. Nadia, you nominated Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s “The Day Nobody Died,” which is very abstract.

Douglas: What is it?

Vellam: They did this project in Afghanistan where they took rolls of photo paper and put them outside, exposing them to the sun or the weather. Whatever would happen while the photo paper was exposed was the work. It’s about a new idea of photography, about it not depicting something specific but creating a mood. And this one was taken, as the title says, on a day nobody died, which is such an interesting and different way to talk about a conflict.

21. Richard Drew, “Falling Man,” 2001

When it was first published by The Associated Press, the photojournalist Richard Drew’s image of a man falling to his death from the World Trade Center on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, was denounced by many readers as exploitative. Several media outlets published the image once, on Sept. 12 — including The Times, on page A7 — but it then disappeared from circulation, confined to shock websites like rotten.com. There was no shortage of graphic images of 9/11, including footage of the planes flying into the buildings. But Drew’s photo was uniquely unsettling because of its uncomfortable elegance: a single victim, framed by both north and south towers, caught in a fragile stasis before death. The image eventually began a strange afterlife as “one of the most famous photographs in human history,” according to the journalist Tom Junod, who wrote a 2003 essay in Esquire in which he attempts to identify the falling man. He couldn’t — not definitively. No one has. Recalling war photography that valorizes the unknown soldier, “Falling Man” would go on to be one of the inspirations for a novel by Don DeLillo and an opera by Daniel Levy. Long after the dust settled on the former site of the World Trade Center, the photograph of the unnamed man remains, like “an unmarked grave,” in Junod’s words, merely asking that we look at it. — E.I.

Miller: I think “Falling Man” is the defining image from the most violent day in America since the Civil War.

Shikeith: I was in middle school when 9/11 happened. Images from that day seem to seep into you. You carry them for life and they dictate certain fears and anxieties.

Miller: And then there are all the images from what happened in the years to come. The pictures of soldiers torturing detainees at Abu Ghraib military prison are arguably the most famous photographs from the war on terror.

22. Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick II, Abu Ghraib Hooded Detainee, 2003

In early 2004, investigations into abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers at the Abu Ghraib detention facility had already been reported by news outlets including The New York Times and CNN. But the government had kept all photographs of torture out of view — until leaked images reached CBS. Even then, the news anchor Dan Rather would claim, the network’s executives only granted permission to show them when faced with the threat of a scoop by The New Yorker’s investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. (CBS executives justified holding the photos on various grounds, including the desire to avoid retaliation against American hostages.) The Abu Ghraib photos finally appeared in both outlets later that year. Their subject matter is brutal: men stripped naked and made to form a human pyramid with soldiers grinning behind them; a hooded man standing atop a box, hooked to electrical wires. The fact that American soldiers had recorded these scenes on their personal cameras only made them more disturbing. The photos significantly shifted American public opinion on the war on terror, further demonstrating the power of an image to alter a story. They also speak to a broader shift in news photography, in which everyone — no matter their intentions — is now a potential journalist. — L.M.

Shikeith: Both “Falling Man” and the hooded Iraqi detainee have a hard-core bodily effect on me. I think there was a sort of naïveté to the world I grew up in, just this idea that America is the greatest place on earth. For a moment there, we believed the myth. At least I did. When I started seeing these images, I developed a distrust in a lot of things. It only got worse. I have a very pessimistic outlook, but it sort of begins here, with these images.

23. Carrie Mae Weems, “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried,” 1995-96

Carrie Mae Weems’s “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried” is a work of appropriation that brings together 34 photographs, many of them of Black Americans, dating from the mid-19th century to the late 1960s, which collectively form a lesson on the history of racism in America. At the heart of the work are four images of people who were enslaved in South Carolina — some of the earliest known images that exist of America’s original sin — taken by the photographer Joseph T. Zealy and commissioned in 1850 by the Harvard University biologist Louis Agassiz. Originally intended to illustrate Agassiz’s baseless phrenological theories of Black inferiority, the pictures were rescaled and reframed by Weems, who also tinted them blood-red, making explicit the violence that allowed for their creation. Stored in Harvard’s archives for more than a century, Zealy’s images fell into obscurity, only to be rediscovered in 1976. After Weems used them without permission, the school threatened her with a lawsuit. “I think that your suing me would be a really good thing,” she told the university, as she later recalled to the art historian Deborah Willis. “You should, and we should have this conversation in court.” Instead of proceeding with the suit, Harvard acquired the work, further complicating the idea of ownership that Weems investigates. — E.I.

Vellam: We should talk about Carrie [Mae Weems].

Meiselas: We should definitely talk about Carrie. There are two very different options [“ Kitchen Table Series ,” 1990, and “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried.”]

Lê: I chose the “Kitchen Table Series” [in which Weems poses as the matriarch in various domestic scenes she staged in a single room, containing little else but an overhead lamp and a table]. The kitchen table is symbolic — it’s the intimacy of the home. In a way I always felt these pictures were about people being able to be themselves, being open and visible in a way that they maybe can’t in public.

Marcoci: To me, the “Kitchen Table Series” is a true performance for the camera in a way that Cindy’s is in “Untitled Film Stills.” But “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried” is an amazing work because it engages with race, with slavery, with colonialism, through an archive. The subjects here were really originally presented as specimens. But what Carrie does is give a voice back to these subjects, whose voices were completely muted. She enlarges the photographs. She tints them blood-red. The whole thing becomes a poem.

Shikeith: This particular work taught me how to use photographs to tell a story. And the fact that [Harvard threatened to sue her] introduces this whole other issue about who gets to tell what stories.

24. Deana Lawson, “Nation,” 2018

The idea for “Nation” came to Deana Lawson in a dream. She was haunted by a story that George Washington’s false teeth were made from the teeth of enslaved people . For months, she kept an image of Washington’s dentures — held in Mount Vernon’s collection — on the wall of her bedroom. Lawson dreamed about a person wearing a mouth guard and wondered if she might forge a connection between the majesty of gold — the jewelry of hip-hop and the regalia of the Ashanti Kingdom — and the fact that the first president of the United States could only speak the lofty words of liberty through teeth that once belonged to the oppressed. Lawson is known for portraits she stages in homes and other intimate spaces, often decorated with a large array of objects: family pictures, children’s toys, a Michael Jackson poster. In her images, Black men and women, their skin captured in color with meticulous attention to shade and tone, appear not as documentary subjects but as vessels. “Her people seem to occupy a higher plane, a kingdom of restored glory,” the novelist Zadie Smith has written of Lawson’s photography. At the photo shoot for “Nation,” Lawson offered three hip-hop artists a selection of jewelry and a mouth guard, typically worn during dental procedures, painted gold. “Someone said that I’m ruthless when it comes to what I want,” Lawson says in an interview in her self-titled 2018 monograph. “I have an image in mind that … burns so deeply that I have to make it, and I don’t care what people are going to think.” “Nation” presents an endless series of questions about Black lineage, going back centuries before the nation’s founding. Lawson later printed the picture of Washington’s teeth on a card and slipped it into the edge of the work’s golden frame. — B.E.

Miller: Deana Lawson seems to be doing something similar to Weems in “Nation.”

Marcoci: I think that’s an amazing image. It’s actually a collage, with the picture of George Washington’s dentures tucked into the top right corner. She’s said photography has the power to make history and the present speak to each other.

25. Carlijn Jacobs, “Renaissance,” 2022

On July 29, 2022, when Beyoncé released “Renaissance,” the first of what she’s envisioned as a three-act magnum opus (act two, “Cowboy Carter,” was released this March), the public was exhausted after two and a half years of pandemic restrictions and unprecedented change to their daily routines. They were stir-crazy and impatient for the dance floor. Beyoncé embraced the sounds of house music pioneered by Black and queer D.J.s, as well as the subversive, high-gloss styling of ballroom culture. The singer appears on the album’s cover in a Giannina Azar-designed silver rope dress, sitting astride a horse covered in mirrors. The image was taken by Carlijn Jacobs, a Dutch fashion photographer interested in the art of masquerade and maximalist glamour, and alludes to both rodeo and royalty. It also conjures a range of artistic references, including Kehinde Wiley’s painting “ Equestrian Portrait of Isabella of Bourbon ” (2016); Rose Hartman’s snapshots of Bianca Jagger on a white horse at Studio 54 in 1977; and John Collier’s 1890s painting of Lady Godiva, the 11th-century Englishwoman said to have rode her horse naked through the streets as a form of protest. — B.E.

Vellam: Does anybody else feel like we’re missing a pop-culture celebrity moment? If we’re talking about images that go everywhere, and that people who live in the middle of the country all are going to look at, I don’t feel we have that.

Douglas: I think it’s important to include the idea of celebrity culture in photography. I’m not quite sure what that would be.

Lê: There’s the [2017] picture of Beyoncé pregnant with all the flowers .

Miller: Initially, Shikeith had also picked Beyoncé from the album cover of “Dangerously in Love” (2003).

Marcoci: But sorry, why don’t we then just choose a [Richard] Avedon of a celebrity?

Vellam: Marilyn Monroe [from 1957]. But don’t we feel like we have plenty of photographs from the past? Don’t we want to think about what celebrity is now?

Miller: What’s the iconic pop culture image from the last five years?

Douglas: Is there a Kardashian image?

Vellam: I can’t, because I hate them so much. But yes, you want the thing of [Kim Kardashian] when she broke the internet with her butt [an image that ran on the cover of Paper magazine in 2014].

Douglas: I’m going back to Beyoncé, because [you want] an image of a celebrity who’s not a person but an image. She’s like a simulacrum somehow.

Vellam: With her “Renaissance” cover, suddenly she was plastered everywhere. It was all over the city.

Douglas: I’d buy that.

Shikeith: I think it’s very important that she released this album and highlighted Black queer contributions to music in the culture because, very frequently, those same contributions are erased or attributed to someone else. Especially in pop culture.

Marcoci: Can you hold it up on your phone?

Vellam: Yeah. I listen to it all the time.

Top: Gordon Parks, “Department Store, Mobile, Alabama” (1956) © the Gordon Parks Foundation; NASA/William A. Anders, “Earthrise” (1968); Alberto Korda, “Guerrillero Heroico (Che Guevara)” (1960) © Alberto Korda, courtesy of the Alberto Korda Estate; Stuart Franklin, an unidentified man blocking a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square (1989) © Stuart Franklin/Magnum Photos; Deana Lawson, “Nation” (2018) © Deana Lawson, courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery; LaToya Ruby Frazier, “United Auto Workers and Their Families Holding up ‘Drive It Home’ Campaign Signs Outside UAW Local 1112 Reuther Scandy Alli Union Hall, Lordstown, OH, 2019,” from the series “The Last Cruze” (2019) © LaToya Ruby Frazier, courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery

An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the first presentation of LaToya Ruby Frazier’s series “The Last Cruze.” A selection of images from the series ran in The New York Times Magazine in May 2019, and the larger work was later shown as a multimedia installation at the Renaissance Society in Chicago. It was not first presented at the Renaissance Society. The article also misstated the date of the Tank Man photograph by Stuart Franklin in Beijing; it was June 5, 1989, not June 4. 

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M.H. Miller is a features director for T Magazine. More about M.H. Miller

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