Tom Nagel
March 7, 2011
Electronic Photojournalism
Web Site Critique II
For this critique of photographers’ portfolio websites, I looked at two very different sites in terms of content and design. Maurice Krijtenberg is a skilled fashion and travel photographer. Joao Silva is a renowned photojournalist who covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The main difference between their website portfolio is design. Where as Silva’s site is very basic, Krijtenberg’s work is presented in some very creative and interactive ways. For example, I found his site on a designer’s blog that listed exceptionally designed photographer’s site. Silva, on the other hand, I searched for out of my own curiosity.
Both websites seem to reflect their photographer’s service or niche. If you’re familiar with the work of Silva, you know his photojournalism covers serious issues. New York Times readers followed his pictures of war, and he was even injured by a landmine while on assignment. It is fitting that his pictures don’t need design gimmicks to highlight the content of the work. From Silva’s homepage, categories link to simple slide shows. Within those slide shows, “Shi’a Uprising” is one example, thumbnails on the bottom of the screen can be scrolled through left to right, and clicking shows an enlarged image in the middle of the screen. The work is content driven, and captions are displayed for the selected image. Here, simplicity is a luxury that the photographer can afford because the images speak for themselves in newsworthiness and visual impact.
Krijtenberg’s portfolio site is more built up design wise. The site’s interactivity is fun to use, which reflects the more lighted hearted nature of the images. The homepage is an image of a table with notes cards behind which a man sits wearing a suit and tie. We are taken to sections called “contact”, “services”, and “portfolio” by clicking the cards on the table. In the “portfolio” section the photographer uses two interesting gimmicks. For fashion pictures, images change by clicking them, and thay appear in a frame held by the suit and tie man from the homepage. This reflects the fashion sense of the photographer. Portraits a placed in frames, as they would be in one’s home, and a well dressed man displays each image. It’s a nifty concept.
In the travel photography section, images are lined up left to right in long sequences, the viewer finds his or her browser’s horizontal scroll bar becomes very large. As the scroll bar travels to the right, the viewer travels along the simple side-by-side layout. So, stationary images become interactive by layout, and the viewer travels or moves as opposed to the still images. It’s a creative way of putting the viewer into the vacation, while also allowing the photographer to display images in a large format.
The lesson from this critique is that a website’s style ought to reflect the content of its photographs. It’d be odd making war photos gimmicky, and, by the same coin, boring to see fashion photography in a boring way. I’m most intriqued by the horizontal lay out of Krijtenberg that makes interactivity in a browser instead of building it via html. It’s very clever.
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