a small voice

is Statesboro Herald staff photographer Scott Bryant’s blog.

Mass communications in the era of the internet is a two-way street. Journalists are now seeking more interpersonal communication with their audiences. Hopefully, this blog will offer statesboroherald.com users an opportunity to interact with their local paper’s photojournalist and provide feedback and conversation.

Scott hopes to reach out and provide insight about his job and his mission to help his community reflect and learn about itself through photography. Sometimes he may bring to light larger issues about the profession of photojournalism. Other times, he may muse about the stories behind the photographs that are published, or sometimes unpublished. He loves photography, and could post tips about the medium he loves. There might even be a rant, here and there.

The blog gets its name from great photojournalist W. Eugene Smith, who once said

“Photography is a small voice, at best, but sometimes one photograph, or a group of them, can lure our sense of awareness.”

Smith, first known for his intense photographs of WWII in the Pacific Theater, virtually created the modern photo essay in his work for Life magazine in the 1940s and 1950s. He was obsessive in his pursuit to document the human condition through pictures and words, uncompromising in his professional standards and idealism, and notoriously difficult to work with. He once took a three-week assignment to document the city of Pittsburgh in 100 photographs and turned it into a three-year crusade that produced over 20,000 images. The resulting work was too unwieldy to ever publish with Smith’s stipulations. Despite his fanatical and frequently self-destructive behavior, Smith set a standard of compassionate and positive photography for all later generations of photojournalists.