Love Beyond (A Cup) Measure

There’s a saying that goes “baking is love made edible.” It’s probably a quote that nine-year-old Ethan has never heard, but after this last week, it’s likely the way he feels now.

This week, I was asked to babysit my nephew Ethan for an afternoon so his 13-year-old sister and 15-year-old brother could get their second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. The moment they closed the door behind them, he looked at me and exclaimed “I want to bake them something!”

Ethan told me he saw how the vaccine had affected his parents and was worried his older siblings would be going through the same thing in a couple of hours. He hoped that by offering them something sweet, they’d feel better after getting pricked. Talk about emotional maturity. 

We quickly scoured through the fridge and kitchen pantry and just barely found the ingredients needed to make banana bread. He happily took on the challenge and was ready to bake his first-ever solo dessert.  

Just as he started mashing up the bananas with a fork, I stopped him, opened every window blind in the kitchen and ran to my car to grab my camera. Because he had never made anything before, I knew it was going to be a messy few hours and wanted to capture every step of the way. If anything, at least it would prove to his siblings that he actually did it all on his own. 

Some two hours and a huge mess later, I was able to capture not only the joy and intrigue from a boy who had never cooked or baked anything from scratch, but the love of a brother who just wanted to do something nice for his brother and sister.

Through these moments in time, I was able to create a photo story— an intimate form of visual storytelling about a single person. Author Eman Shurbaji, goes into this type of storytelling in the article Photo Narratives. “Typically, it will focus the edit on one place character that serves as the connective theme in the entire photo presentation.”

While guiding Ethan through the recipe, I hoped to capture the process of creating a banana bread, through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy. Each photo in the series chronicles the simple way to make this dessert by someone who had never even cracked an egg. 

In author Jade Lien’s The Four Principles of Visual Storytelling, she details the importance of making images feel real and personal. The subject of my photo story was a child, which made it tough to stage anything. His faces were genuine because all he was thinking about were his siblings.

“The stories your images tell need to feel relevant to your audience to make that emotional connection,” she went on to say. Anyone with brothers/sisters, cousins, nieces/nephews or sons/daughters knows the love between siblings is immeasurable. Knowing this is also where the title of my project stemmed from, as well as the ode to baking and its use of measuring cups. 

While Ethan was too excited to even wait for his siblings to have a slice, the moment he showed it to them, they couldn’t believe their little brother did it all on his own. Their dad later told me they ended up having a piece with a side of vanilla ice scream for dessert that evening. Too stirred about what he had made, the topic of their vaccines and potential side effects only warranted a brief mention.

My Creative Process

My goal with this project was to capture a story. Because telling a story through photos differs from doing so through print or video, it’s important to show a representation of an exact moment of time, as stated in Shurbaji’s article. “Photo storytelling is different from a picture portfolio or collection,” she says. “It’s not a random collection of photos, or a display using albums from Flickr or Instagram.”

Shurbaji also states that both the narrative and the photos drive the story. “The pictures support what’s in the text, but a person can understand the topic without having to read text or captions,” she says in the article. “Pictures are placed throughout text or together in a gallery, usually as a slideshow.”

For my series, I categorized them to flow from one photo to the next, in chronological order.  It begins at the start of the recipe with him smashing the bananas and progresses in order after each step of the recipe to the eventual reveal of the banana bread.

As far as the actual photos, they do follow the Gestalt Principle of Figure Ground. Throughout the series of photos, where Ethan is in the foreground, the kitchen is in the background. In the images where the ingredient or baking tool is in the foreground, he is in the background. By having the subject or object in focus at the front and the background soft or out of focus, I’m able to accentuate the figure-ground relationship, which allows viewers to understand this interaction.

I also wanted to convey joy through this visual story as well as show the anticipation Ethan was feeling because he couldn’t wait to show his siblings the final product. As claimed by Robery Plutchik in Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions, combining basic emotions like joy and anticipation create optimism, which I believe were conveyed through these photos, in addition to his innocence and excitement. 

By the end of the recipe, and therefore the end of the impromptu photoshoot, I had taken a total of 134 photos, which may sound like a lot for a single event and one location, but I wanted to be sure I captured every face he made. Had I missed when he first carried the heavy bowl filled with dense ingredients or as he sat in front of the oven for 20 out of the 55 minutes it was in there, I would have missed some truly memorable moments. 

One of the final things I did for this project was come up with the captions for each photo. I didn’t want to flat out explain what was happening in each image because the viewer could themselves see what was happening. In considering this, I thought about the WED principle, which is the marriage of Writing/Editing/Design. The WED principle is important in photo storytelling and photojournalism because it helps the audience understand the bigger picture. “We are talking about visual journalism here, which continues to involve the use of photos, videos, infographics, but not as an appendix to the story, but woven into the texture of it.” It was important to not just state facts, but create a story that helps the audience understand what was going on inside his head. 

In Storytelling in the Age of Emojis, author Adam Bloomberg says images can resonate across age, gender, beliefs and individual experiences. Photojournalists have an important job. They’re able to make the audience feel strongly about a person, place or specific event. Every choice made contributes to the way they end up feeling. The angle the photo is taken, whether it’s in color or black and white, what lens they used to take it.

Nicole Dahmen supports this concept in How to Do Better Visual Journalism for Solutions Stories when she says “The idea is to make images that matter to the specific story, rather than seeking visuals afterward that ‘fit.’”

Every aspect in photo storytelling is thought out, and because of all a photojournalist’s considerations, they are able to help evoke emotion to strangers and guide the narrative in any way. 

---

References:

Bloomberg, A. (2017, August 22). Storytelling in the Age of Emojis. Litigation Insights. https://www.litigationinsights.com/storytelling-emojis/. (Module 2)

Bonner, C. (2015, September 15). Using Gestalt Principles for Natural Interactions. thoughtbot. https://thoughtbot.com/blog/gestalt-principles. (Module 2)

Dahmen, N. (2017, November 22). How to Do Better Visual Journalism for Solutions Stories. MediaShift. http://mediashift.org/2017/11/visually-reporting-solutions-stories-newsrooms-classrooms/. (Module 4)

Foundation, I. D. (2021, January 25). Putting Some Emotion into Your Design – Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions. The Interaction Design Foundation. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/putting-some-emotion-into-your-design-plutchik-s-wheel-of-emotions. (Module 2)

GARCÍA, M. A. R. I. O. R. (2017, January 19). Blog: Digital storytelling, Part One: The fusion of writing/editing/design. García Media. https://garciamedia.com/blog/digital_storytelling_part_one_the_fusion_of_writing_editing_design/. (Module 4)

Lien, J. (2019, November 21). Worth 1,000 Words: The 4 Principles of Visual Storytelling. amplifi. https://amplifinp.com/blog/4-principles-visual-storytelling/. (Module 1)

Shurbaji, E. (2014, December 17). Photo narratives. Medium. https://medium.com/learning-journalism-tech/photo-narratives-d77b812f99dd. (Module 4)