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Becoming Cousteau
So giddy to join the prolific Mridu Chandra to discuss her process for creating award-winning feature documentaries, such as Becoming Cousteau, at this weekend’s Pittsburgh Filmmaker Conference. Our conversation on “The Art of the Documentary” will be this Saturday, Nov. 20th, at noon. Congrats to her as her latest film continues to soak up the accolades.
Link for more info on the conference, part of Film Pittsburgh’s cadre of awesome November events, is here.
VCPGH | The Fall 2021 Gathering
Excited to help host the Rust Belt & Appalachia Documentary Film Festival this Saturday, November 6th, 6-9 PM at Carrie Furnace, part of our push to grow both connection our film community and a Pittsburgh chapter of Video Consortium. Come join us, eat, drink, socialize, and see work from the region all in the backdrop of one of my favorite places in the region, Carrie Furnace in Rankin. With work from Curren Sheldon & 100 Days in Appalachia, Carmen Gentile & Postindustrial, Mallory Brangan & Juliette Rihl, Amanda Page & David Bernabo, Lauren Elise Santucci, Christiana Botic, Daymon Long, David Zucker & Luke Terrrell, and a premiere from Braddock legend Tony Buba.
This one-night event hosted by The Video Consortium’s Pittsburgh chapter will screen selected short documentaries from Pittsburgh and the surrounding Rust Belt and Appalachian regions. There will be plenty of food, drinks, music, and some downtime to hang out with friends and colleagues. Come early to make new connections and demo some of the newest professional camera gear, like the Sony Fx9 and Canon C500, brought to you by our equipment sponsor, Resolution Rentals. Hope to see you there!
My brother in the 49 degree Cuttalossa Creek, after making sure it was cold enough with his girlfriend’s meat thermometer.
Thanks so much to Carmen Gentile
of Postindustrial for having me (and my clucking infant) for a
conversation on long term storytelling in photojournalism, transitioning
from stills to video, Pittsburgh, and other things I like to nerd out
on. Photo of one of my favorite Steel City corners above, and podcast link below: https://postindustrial.com/stories/documenting-people-and-culture-in-postindustrial-communities/
I still can’t find the words to express the whirlwind of feelings after hearing that Coverings, our investigation of child sexual abuse and cover-ups in the insular Amish and Mennonite communities, was named as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It’s my sincere hope that the survivors who took a risk in sharing their most vulnerable stories with us in hopes of building safer, more healing communities for new generations feel their voices amplified in this moment. We hear change is happening for the better, and I couldn’t think of a better honor than that.
Reporting like this is not born in a vacuum, it’s mopped from the brows of a team of people who believe in the hard work of stories that are hard to report. I am overwhelmed with gratitude to learn from Peter Smith and Shelly Bradbury, whose humble excellence in the craft of reporting carries beyond the page and into the sinews of who they are. Editors Rebecca Droke and Lillian Thomas understood the importance of time, patience, and gentle guidance as we continued to bring back new pieces of a complex puzzle to connect together. My fellow photo staff picked up other assignments so I could be on the road or editing. Designers Zack Tanner and Alex Miller built impactful, clean presentations from the pile of text, video, and photos we’d built throughout the months.
Even further behind-the-scenes are each of our at-home support systems. My family supported me from afar with love and patience I can’t possibly deserve (even while worrying about me and probably not understanding entirely what I was doing). My partner Justin Merriman never questioned the importance of spending time away to work on this, even through my all-nighters of video editing I pulled on our long-awaited vacation at the beach. He gets why it’s important on a broader level, and I can’t imagine this past year without his loyalty and understanding. A tip of my hat to the motel vending machines I frequented as I backed up and organized files after long days of interviews. And to my grandad, a newspaper man through and through, who always told me I would see my name on the Pulitzer list (and who I always thought was just being a sweet grandad by saying that)– I hope you can see this wherever you are.
My fellow Leo and philosopher, Mike Merriman, with his upright bass in the home he grew up in in Greensburg, Pa. With his voice like buttered gravel and love for mysterious music, Cohen seems appropriate on his birthday:
“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.”
Shirow
It all begins with an idea.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.
Man vs Wild
It all begins with an idea.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.
Midori
It all begins with an idea.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.
Thanks to @buzzfeed for including our latest story in the “Growing Up Through the Cracks”
series on child poverty as part of their “8 Photo Stories That Will Challenge Your View
Of The World” list.
The Brown family lives in rural Saltlick, Pa., where 2/3 of children are living in poverty. As milk prices continue to dip and Mary Beth Brown struggles with the physical, emotional, and financial pain of Stage 4 breast cancer, the Browns fear they will be the first generation in their family in 200 years to lose the dairy farm they feel call home.
In the rural area, government services are hard to access. The local officials don’t see social services as their job, while federal and state benefits are funneled through the county seat in Uniontown, a 40-minute drive with no transit options, writes reporter Chris Huffaker.
For the Brown children, a strong social network, centered on their family and their church, has shielded them.
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“They go fishing, they shoot bows and arrows,“ Ms. Brown said. "They don’t know they’re poor.” Read more and see more photos at the Post-Gazette here.
What a rugged emotional landscape this past year was, inside and outside the newsroom walls. Our newsroom receiving the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting feels confusing, an oscillation between wanting to laugh and cry (and barf?). Recognitions like this don’t take way the pain behind what happened, but hopefully honor it, and acknowledge what we can do together pushing in the same direction. “We are not so much celebrating as affirming … the job we were put on this earth to do,” said David Shribman, our former executive editor. “Let’s dedicate ourselves to the memory of those whose lives were lost.” And now, back to work.
Thanks to the PA NewsMedia Association for recognizing Keeley and the Vial and our ongoing series about
raising children in the modern overdose crisis in their photo story and
series categories. I know I’m lucky to work for a paper that believes in
investing the time it takes to do these deep dives (and that allows me
to work with investigative reporter Rich Lord), and I hold dear the
trust given to us by the Ashbaughs and others who let me in to try to
show a bit of their lives.
Since this published, TJ and Kate’s four
little girls welcomed a baby brother named in honor of their late Uncle
Ricky, whose fatal overdose shook the branches of their family tree. TJ
lives knowing that could have been his fate, as well. As he raises his
children in recovery, he makes no secret of the disease that killed his
brother and turned his ex into a missing person, and has taught his
youngest daughter to give a goodnight kiss to the vial of his brother’s
ashes he keeps around his neck. Head to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette interactive here to see more photos and videos, read the story, and learn more about how T.J. and Kate are working together to acknowledge
the generational cycles of addiction in their family and how to best
raise their children to be aware of it.
Top photo: Michelle
Kenney looks out of the Allegheny County Courthouse window before the
start of the homicide trial of former East Pittsburgh police officer
Michael Rosfeld, charged in the fatal shooting of her son, 17-year-old
Antwon Rose II. “As a mom, you can’t prepare for this — you just have to
do it — there is no go-to map on this,” Ms. Kenney said. “I’ll treat it
as any other role that I have as Antwon’s mother. I just have to do
it.”
“We will continue to reach out to the community, to call on the community to come together,” said 1Hood activist/musician Jasiri X during a vigil in Rankin to honor Antwon. People gathered on
the basketball court in Hawkins Village where Antwon once played, a
painting of Antwon’s smiling face looking out above an altar of flowers
and candles. Addressing Antwon’s family, Jasiri said, “We will not
abandon you in this time… We are with you.”
The words came after a
weekend of marches into businesses and through the streets in dark,
rain, and shine after the acquittal of former East Pittsburgh Police
officer Michael Rosfeld in the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Rose. The marches continued through the week, with hundreds of students walking out
from school and into the rain to flood the streets of downtown
Pittsburgh and chanting the name of Antown Rose II. Third grader Esme
carried a painting she made of Antwon that read, “This is why we kneel. #JusticeforAntwon.”
Across town at Woodland Hills High School, Antwon’s mother addressed
his former high school classmates. “I got up there and said what I would
have said to Antwon,” Ms. Kenney said. Don’t walk out of school in
protest, she told them. Get an education and work to effect change.
Vote. “Do what Antwon isn’t here to do.”
If you have suggestions on stories you want to see from your Western PA community, feel free to contact me to start a conversation.
“It might not happen with one image, it might take thousands of images layered in a consciousness - a national consciousness, and individual consciousness - to really move people forward, move people to action, but I do believe images have that power.” -Lynn Johnson says it best.
Join me at Robert Morris University, let’s talk photojournalism and storytelling!
Bella holds still as her mother dresses her for her first
time as Atabey in a Taino Full Moon Ceremony in their neighborhood of
Hazelwood. The ceremony marked the last full moon for the winter season
and honors the monthly cycles of the earth, human women, and Atabey, or
the cosmic matriarch in the Taino people’s tradition. Miguel Sague, a
behike (or shaman) at Caney Indigenous Spiritual Circle, spoke of the
way that the full moon pulls on the tide’s of the earth’s blood, or the
oceans and water. “Human blood also does the same thing, at least in the
body of women,” he said, "All of us, including men, all benefit by
this cycle of fertility.“
Bella’s mother,
Dayvanna, held tears in her eyes as she watched her daughter take this
right of passage. "I get to witness you and all the studies you’ve done
to be able to embrace this moment for yourself.” She thanked the cosmic
mother for another month of life and blew prayers in smoke to her
ancestors.
I felt the weight of hundreds
of years of colonization on my shoulders as I watched this beautiful
moment unfold. I know the harsh history of photojournalism, white
colonialism, and indigenous people, the conflict and misunderstanding
caused by the lens of outsiders, pressing up against the understanding
that there I was, in a small living room, witnessing something that this
young woman had been anticipating her whole life. My head still swarmed with thoughts of the history of my
whiteness crashing up against this beautiful, breathtaking, quiet
acknowledgement of the infinite and divine, womanhood and moonhood, of a
repeating line of mothers and daughters that goes back farther than I
can understand.
Miguel must have sensed my struggle. He
looked at me and told me that the Taino people had painted their ceremonies on cave walls, which
read as accounts of those times, the revelations and traditions and
manifestations that occurred. “You are one of those cave painters on
those cave walls,” he told me. Dayvanna agreed.
I
don’t know if they knew that this week, with what we’ve been dealing
with in our newsroom, these words, this beautiful expression of
forgiveness and understanding, would give me the strength and clarity of purpose I need to
carry through. There’s still more work to do (okay, a lot of work to
do), but I’ll never forget that moment.
A year after our original reporting published, Rich Lord and I traveled back to see how “OD Road” is changing, slowly, into Recovery Road. Here in Pittsburgh’s once most fatal ground for the epidemic, overdoses are dropping, and 1,050 “saves” have been made — almost all by other opioid users — using naloxone distributed by Prevention Point Pittsburgh since 2017.
I had to check that my mouth wasn’t hanging open while visiting Donna Williams. She had opened up from her “raw, get out of my neighborhood” approach to people in addiction to wanting to offer clean needles and health services on her block instead. She baked cookies for the men in the recovery house up the street, she is partnering with a man who formerly sold and used drugs to transform the minds of her neighbors.
Despite the cautious optimism, ripples of trauma are still carrying through families for generations. Here’s what people shared with us.
When we sat with Gary Fisher months before his own fatal OD, he foreshadowed the abandonment he would pass on from his own childhood to his daughter’s.
“Abandonment’s a big thing, it was a big thing for me. I was abandoned by one person that I didn’t think should ever abandon me. And I fear that for my daughter, that she’s going to wonder why dad left, why he’s not around, why he died. And she’s going to have questions and she’s never going to get answers. And that feeling that I live with on a daily basis, I don’t want anybody to go through. And I don’t want her to feel like I gave her up.”
We went back to Gary’s daughter’s house in McKeesport, Pa. as she struggles with the anxiety of the bullying and night terrors she is experiencing in the wake of her father’s death. Her story is part of the final chapter of Needle in the Family Tree, a yearlong look at how the opioid and overdose epidemic is impacting families in Western Pennsylvania. Head to the Post-Gazette here for more.
At top: A moonshiner peeks out from his cook shack as he makes a batch of moonshine in southern West Virginia.
I’m stoked to share my first assignment for ESPN on West Virginia’s unique culture around moonshine, football, and the
Mountaineers. I met some truly awesome and fascinating people who taught
me the economic and legal history of the strong stuff, the difference
between sugar shine and shine made with corn whiskey, and in a
yellow-leaved holler in the dark of night, how to make it in small
batches. Mostly, I got to see how moonshine is a point of pride that brings
people together and marks times to celebrate.
From the story by
Jake Trotter: “Don’t take West Virginians as nothing but hillbillies
that drink moonshine blah, blah, blah. That’s not who we are. Moonshine
is a way to bring generations together… and West Virginia’s one big
family.”