Training Your Lens on the Land of Beauty

Apr 9, 2012   //   by Doug Cumming   //   Photography & Photojournalism, Urbino, Italy, Video  //  No Comments

Doug Cumming is an associate professor of journalism at Washington & Lee University with 26 years experience at metro newspapers and magazines. Since getting a Ph.D. at UNC-Chapel Hill in mass communications, he has taught multimedia reporting and feature writing at Loyola University-New Orleans and at W&L in Virginia.

I am a word man.

But my experience teaching the multi-media class in Urbino last June gave me new eyes for visual communication. I was as eager a student as any of the actual students when Steve or Ryan showed their extraordinary clips of video storytelling. And the photojournalism that Dennis and Pawel projected on the screen got me falling into a whole new dimension, the way an art professor’s voice in the dark can enlighten me to the meaning of color, light and dark, composition and wordless drama.

The cool thing about doing this international media class in Italy is that Italy does beautiful imagery like no other place on earth. It is the land of beauty, in its culture, attitudes and natural light.

I’ve just read a piece in the current Nieman Reports by a second-career journalist named Frank Van Riper, who was ahead of the curve in taking a buyout from his newspaper, New York’s Daily News – in 1989. He had been a reporter and editor in the D.C. bureau, but was also a photographer. And it was photography that drove his Take Two career for the next two decades. His article is a message of hope and encouragement to anyone in the news business who worries about the uncertainty of the future. There are many surprising paths, he points out, using his own success in commercial photography as an example.

But what caught my attention was his latest serendipity, and book – Serenissima: Venice in Winter (see the video trailer, above).

This is book of black and white photos of that amazing city just up the Adriatic coast from Urbino. Having teamed up with a travel agent to add Italy to his portfolio, Van Riper also gives photography workshops twice a year in Umbria.

It you want to improve your video storytelling, or photojournalism, there’s no prettier place for background or foreground than Italy.

I can’t wait to get back there.