Interview Samuel Bollendorff

Hello. Today I'm with Samuel Bollendorff in his flat in Paris. We'll be talking about his multimedia work and his views on the development of this area of journalism. Samuel Bollendorff has been working with digital media for a while now, first as a photographer, because he had to move from film cameras to digital ones, and subsequently with his photographic work on the internet. He was chair of the independent photographers' agency L'Œil Public from 2000 to 2010 and during this time he played a part in setting up the L'Œil Public website, which made the agency one of the first to present their work on the internet. Towards the end of his time at L'Œil Public he started to get interested in multimedia narrative. This led to him making a web documentary called "Journey to the End of Coal", which was about coal mining in China. He portrayed the gruelling work of Chinese miners and the environmental consequences of this mining in China. "Journey to the End of Coal" was released in 2008 and caused a great deal of surprise among viewers. It was the first time that a project like this had been produced. I still remember how surprised I was when I saw it for the first time. I thought, "This is a new way of telling a journalistic story." Samuel, thank you for inviting us here. Six years after "Journey to the End of Coal", what do you make of people's surprise when they first saw this work? First of all, "Journey to the End of Coal" was a seminal moment in investigative work by photojournalists, but I'm fully aware that I didn't actually invent anything. Web documentaries and stories like this already existed. We'd had "Thanatorama" and "The City of the Dead", which were both different projects. I think the thing that makes "Journey to the End of Coal" stand out is that this was the first time that this type of production was released on a mainstream press website, lemonde.fr. And so this journalistic investigation, which was part of a series on China that I'd worked on for three years, suddenly this interactive investigation found an audience that was looking for journalistic investigation and had an appetite for information. I think it gave photographers a voice and offered a new form of narration on the one hand, but also of production. How do we tell stories? What motivates us to tell stories? This is what has always driven us and what has brought us together. I'm getting to the point. And so websites were like laboratories for us. In 1998 I'd made a documentary that became a traditional 52-minute video. It was set in a geriatric ward and was produced by MK2. I'd produced a video chronicle on the "Libération" website and in the newspaper in 2005 called "Cité dans le texte". The Œil Public group had set up a magazine called "OE", which had a paper version but also a web version which provided an opportunity for dialogue. It didn't tell stories in the same way, it wasn't simply an online PDF. We were looking for ways of telling stories through the website. We were able to sell our images with downloads etcetera, but there was also the idea of providing a kind of... It wasn't a newspaper, but every month we would offer stories to an audience who were interested in the agency's work. During all these years when we shared our work with the public, we were involved in asking questions about photography but also about text. From 2000 onwards I'd been working on inserting text into prints in the series I produced about AIDS and creating a dialogue between text and photography. I'd even managed to impose... Guillaume did this, and Jean-François Leroy with Visa pour l'Image. Presenting text in a way that gives it a similar status to the images. That dialogue between words, even though they were transcribed, and images has always been part of our questioning approach. And so in 2008, when I came to the end of my work on China, which had been produced with funding from the Ministry of Culture... I'd had trouble getting funding because of the press. This was really the start of our difficulties in producing investigative work. First the Olympic Games, then coal mining, toy factories, environmental problems in China etcetera. I'd cut it up into sections. I'd done this so that the press could latch on to different subjects. No newspaper had dealt with them before. They all distributed them, the same as in other countries, and then they used these subjects. And then one day I met Arnaud Dressen from Honkytonk Films and he suggested that I had a think about how we could try to release a section of this work, the Chinese coal mines, on the web. We basically created a pilot called "Journey to the End of Coal" where we tried to think up a script for the story. It was just based on the investigation, on the facts, but it was actually an experiment. So at that time, with the work you were doing, there was talk about the economic climate and photographers changing and how to use these new tools for telling stories. The press was no longer able to fund this kind of work by itself. At a certain point you had the choice of putting the internet user at the centre and making them the hero of "Journey to the End of Coal", since you'd suggested approaching the subject through that side of the story or from another angle. This approach of getting the internet user involved in stories, does it spell the end of telling stories in a linear way? I don't think it spells the end of telling stories in a linear way. "Journey to the End of Coal" is a journey with a departure and an arrival. So there is a linear element to it, but the internet user can bypass various stages. It's a bit like pressing pause after a sequence in a film so you can take in what was said, then pressing play. I'm exaggerating a bit here, but... The thing that drove us at first was that if we latch on to the idea of the internet, how... The uniqueness of the internet, the notion of interactivity. How do you tell a story by latching on to that tool? It wasn't just a case of making a diaporama with a soundtrack. That had already been done and we didn't think it was that effective. People would often click on the next image without reading the text. And the sound that accompanied the images at that time was often just a bit of music, so it didn't really tell a story. So first we asked ourselves how we could tell a story by exploiting this interactivity. This may seem old-fashioned now but in 2008, when you could make an image cover the whole screen, I thought, "That's the end of television." On the L'Œil Public website at that time we'd put up 400-pixel images because they were a pretty good compromise between download speed and size. But suddenly everything changed with full-screen images. It changed everything in terms of immersion. The viewer could go inside an image and leave the internet. There were no longer toolbars or extraneous messages and so you could immerse them in an interactive story. That was the first issue. Then there was the issue of working on the viewer's attention. What could you do... This was always an issue. People leave a site after 30 seconds. When there's a video they don't watch it. And so the issue was how to renew this "contract of attention" for a long period. We needed to encourage the user to click. To play? For me it wasn't playing because these were real issues to... We were asking them to step into the journalist's shoes. I didn't have a problem with people taking my place. But when we discussed how we could tell stories, getting people to be coal miners or pieces of coal just wasn't possible. In the Chinese coal mines there were, and still are, 20 deaths every day. They're the most dangerous mines in the world. So you couldn't play with the destiny of those miners, those people who die. That was out of the question. I think the interesting thing in our meeting with the people from Honkytonk was that as a journalist I had a position... I was ensuring that the story went in a certain direction. But at the same time interactivity meant pushing the limits and inevitably you also had to accept the need to find interfaces and change position. I tend to say "playful" rather than "playing", but you're still looking to find the viewer in a place where they can react. On the internet, in front of the computer... You had to remember that then, and sometimes now too, your audience were usually alone in front of their computers. With that set-up, if you stopped surfing... It was called surfing then, going from one article to another with Google. If you were trying to immerse the viewer straightaway, the rules that you could draw on, which already existed, were the rules of video games. In other words you'd just have an interface with buttons down below. I wasn't a geek, I didn't play many video games as a child, but from the rare occasions when I did play I remember that there were always counters and things at the bottom of the screen. And so it was important for the image to take up most of the space since we were photographers, but the interface and the buttons would be in places where the user wasn't going to ask how they worked because they'd recognise them. So we used this culture of video games, this collective knowledge, to build interactivity. I didn't want it to be a game, though. We were always treading a fine line and we sometimes got things wrong but I had it in my head that the line couldn't be crossed. We couldn't play with the subject. Isn't it also about dealing with an old problem on a multimedia level? An age-old problem with journalistic work is taking information seriously but presenting it in an attractive way to get the audience interested. Finding a compromise between being serious and being playful. Everybody has this problem. Authors, writers, news editors. If your writing is very dull and there's too much of it, people don't want to engage with it. If a film or a documentary is really boring, people won't take any interest in it. If a story's got a rhythm to it and characters that viewers warm to, you can tell it in a different way. On the web you didn't have the same issues regarding narration. It is audiovisual but it's still mostly photos and sound and not much video. "Journey to the End of Coal" has a few 20-second videos. We were worried that users would switch off during videos because that was when they were passive. If they were passive we could lose them. They needed to be active all the time. Interactive, in fact. We needed them to be active. They could just click straight onto images that didn't move. That's a real... Is it a discovery? I think that was when I really became aware of having a dialogue between sound and still images. The still images in "Journey to the End of Coal" stopped because the user just had to click to change the image but they could stay as long as they wanted on an image with the sound on a loop. A story was told, an off-screen dimension was created. For me that's... Since then I've only worked with an off-screen element. It's about what we can build in terms of the background to an image, to a photo, to extend its duration. For me it's not about making videos to create a scenario where the viewer is encouraged to share the issues that photojournalists have, but it's about creating photos and extending them with sound. In those moments spent viewing still images surrounded by sound, the viewers themselves are at last... the sound immerses them. This allows them to create what they don't see in the image. The sound doesn't need any more details because the image brings the essential, instantaneous elements involved in setting the scene. And that dialogue, with the added visual and auditory elements, allows you to put the viewer in a situation where they connect them. It's their brain, their imagination, their experience that connects the surrounding sound to the image and lets them create with their own vocabulary, their own imagination, and with the words that are speaking to them, so they will be affected. For me that's the discovery in "Journey to the End of Coal". When was the moment that you made this discovery? I think I created it with "Journey to the End of Coal" but it was in retrospect when I asked myself, "What worked in 'Journey to the End of Coal'?" I'd see other productions, the productions that I did after that, and I thought, "What can I do to recreate that honeymoon period?" The chemistry that was in "Journey to the End of Coal". That's when I knew for certain that it was that dialogue between photography and sound, which I've constantly tried to reproduce since then in my work with audio documentary makers and with interfaces that use words. And I realised that the thing that most interests me in my profession is giving people a voice through photography. That's what I was doing by putting text and images together. I'm carrying on with this using different tools. So you're very interested in sound but you're not a specialist in recording or editing sound. How have you progressed in your recent work? Do you join forces with sound specialists or do you make recordings yourself and then ask people to help you? How do you work things out? I think that nowadays photographers are unfortunately faced with a very complicated issue. They used to create still images, mute images, as it were, but nowadays those kinds of images are often no longer enough. That's not because they aren't strong enough to tell a story. We mustn't forget that photography has immense power. But with all the media we have now, the web, tablets etcetera, if you just put a photo on an iPad or a website, it's no longer enough for people who want to spread information. They need to be able to add sound and text and make it dynamic, perhaps even make a video. So photographers feel confronted by the fact that they need to increase their output, their photography. There are various ways to respond. I think that... And equipment has evolved too. Photographers now have cameras with record buttons that make videos. Good videos too. It can be done. But you don't become a video maker just because you've got a record button. It's a profession that exists already. It's called television. There are people who do it very well and know how to do it. They can put films together and break stories up into images. Photographers don't have that training. So photographers are caught between, on one side, a deluge of amateur photography threatening to drown professional photography, so they say that amateur photography is taking over their profession. And, on the other side, the opportunity to make videos, so they often find themselves becoming amateur video makers. The problem with photographers is that they make amateur videos and so they're doing exactly what amateur photographers are doing. We mustn't become amateur video makers. Video can be a proper narrative tool. Photographers have the ability to create moments which they can extend in videos but they mustn't try to make television. They need to try to become the kind of video maker who creates videos that are free from traditional storytelling rules. They're essentially photographers. And so how do we respond to the needs of sponsors, of the press, who might say, "You can make videos for the web. We just need to add some sound"? Photographers can't be a one-man band. Some people are good with sound or good at making videos. Photographers take good photos. Some photographers are bad at writing, others are good writers. But this situation means that photographers need to work as part of a team. That's the solution. Just as photographers used to work with journalists, now they can work with audio documentary makers or with video makers. And on interactive productions with developers and web designers. Photographers can take on the role of the director or coordinator of this group of creative professions. They can create an object where everybody brings the strength of their knowledge. This is quite an appealing long-term solution which enables photographers to use their photography in projects that are based on their work, but where they can get help to build a collective piece of work with other creators. Can you give us an example of work like this? The second solution is where a photographer becomes a one-man band. They use a bit of sound, a bit of video, their photos etcetera. I think the problem with being a one-man band is that you risk doing everything less well. First of all because we're not geniuses and so being a good photographer as well as being a good sound director and a good video maker is quite a tall order. But it's also a question of time. Even if you're brilliant you can't be everywhere at once. And so when you take a good photo you're usually not filming as well, but it's also the time for making a good video and a good sound recording. Sound work is like taking photos. You have to find people to record if you need a voice and find a background. It all takes time. Photographers can't be one-man bands. The thing that worries me about this business is that if photographers try to do everything themselves they dumb everything down a bit. This could of course lead to new productions and to people creating audiovisual or multimedia writing that may or may not be groundbreaking, but they will offer simple products. These could be remarkable but I think you need to be careful about doing everything at once and not doing it very well. And so the first solution would create much more serious productions because a sound director or a journalist can do an investigative piece of work, or even a web designer. You'd have professions and people... people coming from different cultures. So there's a new language of dialogue for photographers to learn. Talking to a web developer isn't part of the same creative culture. All of this is a learning process and it takes time. To pay a lot of people you need a lot of money and to have a lot of money you need to persuade people. It's harder to persuade people to find 100,000 or 200,000 euros than to find 2,000. To persuade people to invest this kind of money you need to write. Photographers need to set themselves up in the role of a film maker or an author, write a project and persuade institutions and creative talents to get involved in their project. I think it's important to have photographers who have this culture of independence, production, creation etcetera, but who are also able to take the plunge and become film makers. Do you try to be one? Can you give us an example of how you try to be a film maker? And, when you're in that role, how do you try to find experts to help develop projects that you will produce? So first of all I think... To go back to your first question about what's happened in the last six years, I've basically become a film maker. It's weird because I don't really know how to describe myself. I tell some people I'm a photographer and others I'm a film maker. "Visual film maker" doesn't mean much. It's hard to describe the place where you've put yourself. I'm not talking about status, that old French problem. But photographers find themselves working with audiovisual networks, journalism networks and authors' rights networks and that creates... that extends their expertise and the range of people that they interact with. First of all with "Journey to the End of Coal", but also with "Nowhere Safe" and "Le Grand Incendie", these are productions where there was... "Nowhere Safe" is a bit different but for "Le Grand Incendie", with Olivia Colo, we wrote... we carried out an investigation, we wrote a documentary project. We had help from CNC, the Centre National de la Cinématographie, and from France Télévisions, who gave us money to write and think about the interactive development of this project because there were issues with the story. Each interactive project has to have a direction. Interactivity is just a tool. So if you click just for the sake of clicking, gratuitously, there's no sense in it. Interactivity has to serve its subject. I'm not reproducing the "Journey to the End of Coal" interface in projects about self-immolation or housing problems because there would be no sense in it. You have to start from scratch every time. Since we're still quite new to this... I often talk about the invention of writing, of cinema, of music... With interactivity we've reached a moment where we're inventing new forms of writing, interactive writing. We must always bear in mind that it's a wasteland. We mustn't try to push interactivity back into a traditional audiovisual mould. It doesn't work. We need to try and find forms that can be adapted to the way they're used, to viewers' situations, so if they're on the computer, on the sofa with the TV on or on the underground using their phone. These are all different situations with different degrees of attention. We need to capture viewers' attention to try and bring them into the story. It takes a long time to imagine and devise an interface and once again it's expensive. So for six months or more I worked with Olivia Colo and the production team on writing "Le Grand Incendie". Then there was production, filming, carrying out our investigation etcetera. Then there was the editing, with an editor, a web designer, a developer, a sound creator and even an actor who read the texts written by the people who had set fire to themselves. This was a completely different kind of writing but it allowed me to create a photographic project about places in France where self-immolation took place. This formed a base within the interactive story, even though there are also a lot of testimonies that I filmed. But this photographic work is work that I can take out of the documentary and use if I want to have an exhibition or a portfolio in the press. The fundamental thing for me is that photography continues to be the central material in the work that I produce. It needs to be able to exist in an interactive production and even be a channel through which I produce an investigation and photographic work, but you mustn't tell yourself, "I only made these images for the web documentary." The images need to be the power behind an installation, a series of photos that you could use as a photographer and present in a portfolio, in a book or an exhibition. They will extend the investigation in all these different forms and encounter different audiences, people who go to exhibitions, people who watch interactive productions, people who buy "Le Monde"... buy newspapers. And so, by carrying out an investigation using various formats, I'm still doing my job, but on the way I've learnt how to become a film maker so that I can carry on being a photographer. As the film maker that you've become, to finish our interview, for the participants in the World Press Photo Academy training scheme, could you give them some advice about working with sound? First of all, I think that sound is fascinating, but the thing you need to realise about sound is that it requires as much commitment as photography. Searching for a sound is like searching for an image. You can't just use a zoom to take close-ups without getting close. To take a good picture you need to get close. I'm not just quoting Capa and saying you're not close enough. I think we've taken a few steps back since he said that in terms of setting. But you need to get to the heart of a scene to photograph it. You need to get to the heart of a scene to record it. That's the first thing. Sound needs to be the object of an installation, a situation, of a progression. Listening to a setting isn't the same thing as concentrating on a voice. And the dialogue between a still image and sound, I find that fascinating and I think photographers hold a trump card there because they have a sensitive ear. A similar approach is involved in searching for a sound and searching for an image. With photography they can establish something very strong and immediate and with sound they can engage the viewer because they are going to move them, as I said, by providing an off-screen dimension and enriching everything outside the frame of the photo, thus extending the image. That's what photography is all about, for me. It has to become audiovisual. But it can still be a photograph when it has sound attached to it. And so you need to keep experimenting. I can't give you any knowledge because I don't know, I try. You need to try. You need to take pictures, create sound, meet people who create sound and interact with them. That's what happened with Mehdi Ahoudig on "Nowhere Safe". It was an amazing encounter because we were in the same place. We did all the interviews together. When he did the sound I was next to him watching and when I took the pictures he was next to me listening. Housing insecurity is a very difficult subject. The incredible thing was that when people told their stories they were sometimes in such a fragile state that they'd break down. We didn't take their photos then, we listened to them and recorded them. They felt more at ease because we weren't looking at them, so they could be fragile. They preserved their modesty. Once they had told their stories, we took the pictures. And so they could recover their dignity and take control of their pictures. They were no longer in a fragile state. And then, when we did the editing, we were able to keep those very intense moments of narration and enrich these modest images. We were able to examine this delicate subject by exploring these stories of insecurity in depth without ever harming the people's dignity. I think this is because of the dialogue between still images and sound. We couldn't have filmed it because we'd have filmed people crying and that would have been offensive. Thank you, Samuel, for those fine words to end our talk. Thank you very much.