Salwan Georges. Fall 2022



The Art of Impactful Storytelling

Instructor: Salwan Georges
2:00 – 4:30 pm Eastern via Zoom
Eight Tuesdays beginning October 4, 2022
Classes will meet weekly but may skip a week subject to Salwan’s shooting schedule.

Course fee: $700
Prerequisite: Students must be at least intermediate level

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Photo by Salwan Georges

Photo by Salwan Georges/The Washington Post

Class Description 

In this course, you will learn how to produce impactful stories by combining documentary and photojournalism work. You will be challenged to examine the art of cohesive storytelling and narrative, and to create a storyline rooted in personal connections and emotional content. The thrust of the workshop is to help students bring a unique personal voice to their work and a new way of seeing their images and the world of documentary and photojournalism. 

Students will develop skills to conceptualize, make and edit documentary narratives that evoke emotion, empathy and connection between subject and audience. Students will have the option to start or continue a long-term project. With guidance, each photographer will create a visual narrative on one theme. Works-in-progress are reviewed and new work from individual assignments is discussed. Project ideas and execution are examined as well as obstacles and how to overcome them. Pulitzer prize-winning staff photographer with the Washington Post will draw on his experience and his background in producing other award-winning stories and will help you learn the skills he has honed in these circumstances.

Topics in this course will include how to work and move in intimate settings, how to research and identify visual stories, how to choose the right equipment for certain assignments, ethical practices, how to collect additional materials in the field and how to approach photo editors to publish your work. The class will also teach students how to balance the needs of media such as newspapers with independent documentary work. The class will include presentations and group discussions on a variety of important and current topics in the industry. The important point is to shoot, evaluate, learn, repeat.  

 

Salwan Georges

Salwan GeorgesSalwan Georges is an Iraqi-American Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist for The Washington Post. He studied journalism at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. In 2021, Georges was named Photographer of The Year by Pictures of the Year International for covering a racial reckoning in Minneapolis, an unforgettable election across the U.S., and a deadly pandemic. In 2022, Georges was awarded a Pulitzer Prize as part of a staff entry from the Washington Post covering January 6 and a team finalist for National Reporting for covering environmental justice stories. In 2020, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize as part of a staff entry from the Washington Post covering climate change around the world and was awarded, a team finalist for Public Service, covering America’s deadly opioid epidemic. Georges's work has been published and exhibited worldwide. His work on the Middle Eastern communities in the United States has been exhibited at the Arab American National Museum and has been added to a collection at the Library of Congress in D.C. Beginning in early February 2022, Georges was on assignment in Ukraine for the Washington Post for two months covering the war in the Donbas region and Southern Ukraine telling stories in cities under attack by Russian forces.


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