Photo Essay

My experience creating a photo essay was not as easy as I thought it would be. The hardest part of this project was finding a topic. The photo essay could be on anything a person, place, or event. It took me about three days to decide what to final do this assignment on. I narrowed it down to running. My first idea was to do the 1980 Olympics in Munich. During the summer Olympics that year, a group of Israeli athletes were taken hostage and then killed in the Olympic Village by a group of terrorist. Right after the event took place the American athletes boycotted the rest of the games in protest, which meant some athletes did not get a chance to compete. This included one of track and fields great, Steve Prefontaine. It was hard to find five pictures of this event. The same single picture kept appearing of one of the terrorist, but there really were not a lot of other pictures. I therefore felt it would be difficult to do this topic. Therefore, I moved on.

The next idea I came up with was the Boston Marathon. At first, this seemed like a good idea. I found pictures from the first Boston Marathon. The problem came to finding pictures of the first women running the marathon. The problem is that the first women snuck into the race because at the time women were not allowed to compete. So there is an unofficial first women’s Boston Marathon then there is an official Boston Marathon. I just thought that might be too difficult to explain and not as historical as I thought this project might require. So finally, I came to my final topic the Olympic marathon.

Using the Olympic marathon as the topic for my photo essay was still a difficult task. I knew the general history of the Olympic marathon had its roots in Ancient Greece. The problem was finding a picture that represented marathon running in ancient Greece since there were no cameras at that point and since the first marathon is technically a legend. Fortunately, Wikipedia provided a very nice picture of an artifact from ancient Greece. Wikipedia was also nice enough to provide a picture of the first modern Olympic marathon. It’s a pretty well known picture in the running world, which was immediately familiar to me. The beginning part of this project was easy, the ending however was a bit more difficult.

Women’s Olympic running I knew was slow to take off. Women were banned from track and field events until the 1928 Olympics. Even then, they were running short events with no race over a half-mile for many years to come. I found out easily that the Olympic marathon for women began in 1982 and easily found the name of the winner. At that point I Googled the name of the winner. Finding pictures of was not difficult. The problem I had was distinguishing whether or not they were copyrighted photos. Most of the pictures of her were from regular running websites and they had no credits on the picture. Therefore, I did my best picking a picture that I do not think is copyrighted. The same issue occurred with my final picture of the 2004 Athens Olympics. The pictures I used I found through a Google images search. The picture was part of a news article on a running website. The credit was part of the picture. Therefore, I used the credit that was attached to the picture. I’m still not exactly sure if I used the picture or gave it a proper credit.

The final problem I had was with my fourth picture about paralympic marathoners. I had a very hard time finding pictures of paralympic competitors. The paralympic’s are not the most popular events so it was hard to find pictures of them. It was even harder to find pictures of the particular marathon event. The paralympics in the last couple of years have had official photographers that have copyrighted their images making it difficult to find pictures. Out of sheer exhaustion of looking for a non-copyrighted image, I chose the opening ceremonies of the 2004 Athens Olympics from Wikipedia to depict that element of the photo essay. Overall, the technical elements of posting the pictures were easy. The difficulty was finding the pictures and figuring out if, they were copyrighted or not.