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.

Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Above is a Greek vase with runners at the panathenaic games around 530 BC. The Marathon is 26.2 mile running race. The first recorded marathon is said to have taken place during the days of Ancient Greece. Legend has it that a Greek solider, Pheidippides, ran from Marathon to Athens non-stop to announce that the Persians were defeated at the Battle of Marathon. He then dropped dead after delivering the news. From this legend and from the ancient Olympic games the Olympic Marathon was born.

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Above is a picture of competitors during the first modern Olympic marathon. In 1896, the first modern Olympics took place in Athens, Greece. The first event of the modern games was the Marathon. On April 10, 1896, seventeen runners began the race on the Marathon Bridge. Competitors included Edwin Flack of Australia, Arthur Blake of the United States, Albin Lermusiaux of France, Gyula Kellner of Hungary, and the other 13 runners were Greek. The winner of the 40K (24.8 miles) course was Spyridon Louis of Greece.

Credit: Lasell College Athletics
Above is a picture of Joan Benoit winner of the first women’s Olympic marathon. At the 1984 summer games in Los Angeles, California, the women’s marathon became an official Olympic event. Joan Benoit of the United Sates won the first gold medal in the event with a time of 2 hours, 24 minutes. The establishment of a women’s Olympic marathon was a struggle. Before the 1980’s, there were no women’s distance races in the Olympics. The longest races were the women’s 1,500 meters (about a mile), which was established in 1972. Long distance running was considered “too strenuous” for women. However, with women running other famous marathons like the Boston Marathon women made a strong case to the International Olympic Committee to get the race added.

Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Above is a picture of the opening ceremonies of the 2004 Paralympic's in Athens. The first paralympic marathon took place during the New York games in 1984. It was open to both male and female competitors. The paralympic marathons are broken down into several races to account for varying levels of disability.

Credit: Victah/www.PhotoRun.net
Above is a picture of the 2004 Olympic women’s marathon. The Olympics that year took place in Athens, Greece and the race route was similar to the ancient path traveled from Marathon to Athens. The top three finishers were Mizuki Noguchi from Japan with a time of 2 hours, 26 minutes, 20 seconds, Catherine Ndereba of Kenya with a time of 2 hours, 26 minutes, 32 seconds and Deena Kastor of the United States with a time of 2 hours, 27 minutes, 20 seconds. The marathon has come a long way from its ancient greek roots.

Website Evaluation

www.nps.gov/vafo/ is the website for Valley Forge National Historical Park. Most commonly, know as Valley Forge, the park is located in Southeastern Pennsylvania about twenty miles outside the city of Philadelphia. Its historical importance lies in its role during the Revolutionary War. The site may describe the significance of Valley Forge best when it says…
Of all the places associated with America's War for Independence, none conveys more the impression of suffering, sacrifice, and ultimate triumph than Valley Forge. No battles were fought here, no bayonet charges or artillery bombardments took place, but during the winter of 1777-78 approximately 2,000 soldiers died at hospitals in the surrounding area nonetheless. Valley Forge is the story of an army's epic struggle to survive against terrible odds, against hunger, disease, and the unrelenting forces of nature.
This website does an outstanding job of conveying Valley Forge’s history while additionally connecting it to the present.

The site is incredibly user friendly right from the beginning. The site home has a banner at the top of the page for the National Park Service: U.S. Department of the Interior with a link to the National Park Service website, nps.gov. On the left is a navigation bar. This navigation bar remains consistent on every page of the site. The navigation bar consists of a search tool that can search the Valley Forge Park site or can search the National Park Service site. Below the search function are ten category headings that link to major areas of the site. In addition to the main categories, there are the Site Index, Frequently Asked Questions, Bookstore, and Contact buttons. The navigation bar is placed in a good location and categorized in an appropriate matter making it easy for uses to find what they are looking for.

Other features that make this site particularly user friendly is the lack of display picture length restrictions. The entire website fits in the window no matter how you manipulate the window. The page can also be made printer friendly so that all parts of the page will be displayed when printed instead of parts being cut off. The text is also easy to read because the font colors are dark with a light background. Additionally the text size can be changed by the click of a button making it small, medium or large.

The site is filled with useful content for all audiences. Most importantly all information is current. There is a timestamp of last updates and is different on each page, not just the entire site. For example the Valley Forge News page is more recent being updated 1/8/07 at 10:22 EST. While the Support the Park page is less recent having last changed on 9/24/06 at 14:06 EST. The content and scholarship varies depending on what part of the site you visit. For the general public who does not want detailed information about the entire winter encampment of the Continental Army the History and Culture page provides about a page and a half summery of the events that took place at Valley Forge. This is an appropriate length for the general public. Enough text to present the important information but not long enough to make them lose interest.

The site does provide content and scholarship for the more academically/historically inclined. The History & Culture page is a good place to find more academic/historical information. There are links to People, Places, Stories, and Collections pages. Each provides increasingly in-depth information the more buttons you click on. To find the most scholarly information you would go to the Collections page then navigate to the Archives & Library page. This page provides links to the library collection at Valley Forge Park, which has approximately 7,000 volumes including books, reports, theses and dissertations, and periodicals. Additionally, the park is in the process of digitizing documents and publications but currently, Valley Forge : Making and Remaking a National Symbol, The Valley Forge Report, and A Demographic Survey of the Continental Army that Wintered at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, 1777-1778 are available online. In addition to this scholarly information, there is a designated area for teachers. This area includes extensive information on how to incorporate Valley Forge Park into the classroom. This includes a 71-page curriculum PDF, which includes primary source activities.

The most exciting part of this website is its use of new media. One would not expect historical websites, especially government historical websites to be the most technologically savvy, but this site proves otherwise. The site has at least two high quality images on every page. It has a special area devoted to Photos & Multimedia. The page is broken down into Photo Gallery and Multimedia Presentations. The Photo Gallery page has ten photo galleries broken down into five categories for easy searching. The Photo Galleries can be either viewed as an Album or viewed as a slideshow with the latest version of Flash. The Multimedia Presentations page has Video and Audio Podcasts available for download.

In brief, the Valley Forge National Historical Park website is one of the best historical sites I have viewed. It contains content and scholarships that all audiences would enjoy. It is incredibly user friendly because of its layout and presentation and its use of new media is surprisingly up to date in current. Most importantly is makes the user want to experience the park first hand.