Twenty five years of... | Scene Through the Lens

This week marks the 25th anniversary of my weekly photo column in the legacy print version of the newspaper. Today’s photo is from Chinatown, which was the scene of the very first installment, published on April 9, 1998.

This online version of the column was launched a decade later, as a blog appearing first as posts of road trips headed out of the city — hence the “scene on the road” that remains in the URL.

Doing just simple math, that’s over 1250 photos. (It’s actually closer to 1400, because there were a few years when two photos ran every week — zoned with a different image for newspaper readers living in both Pennsylvania and New Jersey.)

The column came about when, in the late 90s, newspapers were starting to feel the squeeze of competition from the internet and other media. Readers and advertisers were leaving, and space in print was shrinking.

It was getting more difficult to find room in the newspaper pages for “standalone” photos — other than weather “art” — that didn’t go with a story.

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

I was inspired by a number of regularly appearing photo-driven columns in newspapers around the country. I especially admired the work of Mary Beth Meehan then at The Providence (R.I.) Journal and Suzanne Kreiter at The Boston Globe.

Earlier Sylvia Plachy, at the Village Voice, had an uncaptioned black-and-white photo run every week, and Edward Keating shared a non-conventional wedding photo every week for the “Vows” column at the New York Times.

Around that time, our metro columnist left the newspaper, and the position for his replacement was advertised internally. I applied for the job.

I showed the editors my mockups and explained what a photographer-columnist could do. Philadelphia has over 100 distinct neighborhoods and I proposed visiting a different one 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 listings, my “City Life” neighborhood photo helped break up all the grey type of items gleaned from our website -—neighborhood news, the City Hall calendar, traffic and construction alerts, school information and lists of volunteer opportunities.

» READ MORE: See photos from the column's twentieth anniversary

Every week, after consulting my many maps and the notebook of ideas I was away collecting, 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 after almost 100, I kind of ran out of neighborhoods anyway), but the photo-driven column remained, becoming more of an expression of my “voice” as a visual journalist, and the name was changed.

It’s still called “Scene Through the Lens,” and I still feel really lucky to be doing something I enjoy, sharing the things I see with our readers.

Here are the most recent, in color:

» SEE MORE: Archived columns