Preston Gannaway of the Concord (N.H.) Monitor won this year’s Pulitzer prize for feature photography by chronicling a family coping with a terminal illness. I watched it with the sound turned down first to just look at the photos and it brought it all back. You forget how terribly hard it is watching someone you love suffer and how tough it is carrying on without them. It’s a wonderful piece of work and shows how powerful a tool a camera, in the right hands, can be to tell a story.
Hey John!
Quick question…and a little rambling.
How do you do these “mini” posts in wordpress. This is a great way to just throw something up on your blog without having to write a long entry. Many times I’ve wanted to do this very thing, but didn’t do it because I didn’t want to write a whole post.
By the way, the photos are amazing! Those photos really get to you, and from a photographer’s point of view, I couldn’t help but wonder how he got to do this. It sort of goes along with what they said in that episode of ‘The Genius Of Photography’ where they talk about exploiting situations like this. Personally, I’m of the opinion that situations like this need to be documented just like we document “happy” occasions all the time. (Birthday parties, weddings, etc.) If the photographer is there to get the shot for personal gain, then perhaps it’s not morally correct, but if, for example, the photos will help the family remember, or the act of documenting it helps the family cope with the situation, I think it’s a good thing.
I wonder how the photographer was able to stay disconnected enough to get the photos. Maybe you don’t have to be completely disconnected, and perhaps that’s not the right word, but at least stay back enough to get the photo.
Thanks for putting this up.
Yeah, I was really impressed with the photographs too – to be able to take photos like that and tell a story is very impressive. I think I’d have found myself getting too involved to take a step back and get the sort of photos they did, acting as a window into their lives – which makes them such good pictures in my mind.
What I’ve done is create a category called ‘Snippet’ – which is category ID 24 – and on my index page and archives pages, I’ve got something like the following:
So I can style the snippets differently to normal posts. I was finding that like you I’d want to just put up a link to something but the weight of expectation with my design made me feel like I needed to write several paragraphs per post!
Oh, I can send you a copy of my template if it helps explain it further. Just let me know!
That would be really cool, as I would like to put this on my blog as well. Also, could you tell what you use to get the “Notify me of followup comments via email”. I’ve replied to some comments on my blog, but I wonder if people ever checked back to see the response. I would like to be able to simply reply and have wordpress notify them like your does.
This is great!
The comment subscription (which I wish every site had) is this plugin:
http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/
Check your email, I’ve send you my index template!
Hi John,
Have you tested this site using IE6 recently? The left hand edge of the text of your full length posts is truncated when on the home page and I get a JavaScript error on this line:
st_go({blog:’2746932′,v:’ext’,post:’0′});
This is when I view the site from work, so it may just be our crappy infrastructure! Let me know if you want me to mail you a screenshot.
Thanks John. The first is the danger of me tinkering with my theme, thinking “no need to test on IE6, this couldn’t posssibly break anything” and being wrong! Fixed.
As for the second, that I can’t reproduce but it looks like something going amiss with the WordPress stats that I use… Let me know if you keep seeing it and I’ll investigate!
The JavaScript error may just be because we’ve got a pitifully slow Internet connection here at work and something is timing out.