A photo column turns twenty

Tomorrow marks the 20th anniversary of my weekly photo column. That's over one thousand photos of people, places and things (pigeons, umbrellas, shadows) in my weekly feature,  "Scene Through the Lens" (a visual exploration of the Philadelphia region).

In the late 90s, I had recently returned to the streets as a photographer, after working as a photo editor for a number of years.

As an editor in our Sunday rotogravure magazine, I worked with our staff photographers and freelancers on the sort of multiple story-telling images like those offered decades earlier by LIFE and LOOK magazines. Almost all of them were story ideas that originated with the photographer, and were presented with a minimal amount of text.

Back at the newspaper then, like now, reporters would find the stories and photographers would be dispatched to illustrate them. There was seldom any room for "standalone" photos other than weather "art," with aesthetically-pleasing images of snow, rain, or sunshine.

So I began formulating proposals to try to get more photographer-generated images into the newspaper. I wanted to get editors at the paper to look at photography as another way to tell stories to our readers.

At the time, there were a bunch of regularly appearing photo-driven columns  out there. The University of Missouri spread their story-telling photojournalism philosophy around the country through their grass roots Missouri Photo Workshops, and graduates - many who created photo columns at the newspapers they eneded up at.
 
I especially admired the community work of Mary Beth Meehan  with her "Our Times" column in the Providence Journal; Suzanne Kreiter at the Boston Globe, who rode with the police for her "On the Beat" photo column; and "Florida Found," by Jamie Francis, which was exactly that - found photos - at the St. Petersburg Times.

Earlier Sylvia Plachy, at the Village Voice had an uncaptioned black-and-white photo run every week under the heading "Sylvia Plachy's Unguided Tour." Later on, Edward Keating  shot a non-conventional wedding photo every week for the "Vows" column at the New York Times, with writer Lois Smith Brady.

Around that time, our metro columnist left the newspaper, and the position for his replacement was advertised internally. So, inspired by all those great photographer-columnists, I applied for the job.

I showed the editors here my mockups and explained what a photo column could do. Philadelphia has over 100 distinct neighborhoods and I proposed visiting a different each week and finding a "story" I could tell visually with one photo - and a longer-than-usual caption that I would write.

I didn't get the job. But it did get the editors here thinking of pictures a little, and a few months later when they were creating a new page for community news, it seemed like a good match.

Breaking up the grey type on that page of listings of neighborhood news, the City Hall calendar, a traffic report, school information and a list of volunteer opportunities, would be a single image - my idea for the neighborhoods "story."

Chinatown was the first, published on April 9, 1998. Then every week, after consulting the many maps I had collected, and my notebook of ideas gleaned from bulletin boards, or weekly newspapers, I would go to a new neighborhood and get out of my car. I walked the streets, talking to residents, researching their history, and visually reporting on the things I thought looked interesting in each one I visited. 
After two years, the community page was eliminated (and I ran out of neighborhoods anyway), but the photo-driven column remained, becoming more of a expression of my "voice" as a visual journalist, and the name was changed.

Now it's called "Scene Through the Lens," but I'm still sharing things I notice while working in the city. Like a coat rack during a business conference:

Or a Phillies game on TV inside the Mayfair Diner:

Over one thousand weekly images later, I am still shooting assignments for the newspaper in the city, suburbs and South Jersey, and still looking for images that are out of the ordinary.

Click here for a gallery of .03 % of the photos that have appeared...

Thanks for watching.