Reuters and MediaStorm have collaborated on a multimedia history of the current financial crisis. The online project is entitled Times of Crisis. In their own words, “The project has two parts – a short web documentary and an in-depth visual timeline. The latter contains hundreds of entries woven together into a visual stream of information to show how the crisis has touched lives everywhere.”
It’s a savvy project, and the interactive time line is a good example of how photoj0urnalism has become woven deeply into public communication. The images are not the whole story, but they clearly provide resources for thought, association, and action. The project also provides a case study in perspective: if you hang back and look at the thumbnails, you remain disengaged from a radically fragmented world; if you enter the individual panels and move from place to place, you begin to recognize both the many different injuries suffered around the globe and the deep continuities in need, anxiety, and adaptation.
Today, there are three kinds of people: the have’s, the have-not’s, and the have-not-paid-for-what-they-have’s. ~Earl Wilson