Photo Novellas

Video and movies are wonderful, but without a large crew of experienced people, it's hard to make a good one.  In time and/or money, they're expensive.

Still photography, on the other hand, no matter how evocative, doesn't tell us all we want to know.  I love narrative — I always want to know the backstory and what the person said and what happened next. 

So, looking for a slightly less expensive medium than cinema that still incorporates narrative, we came up with the idea of making picture books — what I term "photo-novellas."

So what's a photo-novella anyway?

The idea of a "photo-novella" is to present a story using a combination of photographs and text.  It resembles traditional picture books, art comics and graphic novels, with the difference that it focuses on tightly integrating the evocative power of good photography with the complexity of narrative.  In digital format, it may include a sound track as well.

Photo-novellas span print and digital publication models, and can be distributed in several different formats at the same time:

Experimental Work

To start with, we're fooling around with how to script a photo-novella. Alma's Mysteries is the beginning of a storyboard for such a work — very much a first draft, but experimenting with how to think about it and how to write it.

As we write more and different ones, we'll keep adding them here.