For Better, For Worse by Mark Mahaney (March 18, 2010) 
(25 votes, average: 3.80 out of 5)
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Introduction by Monica Khemsurov and Jill Singer
In many ways, the jobs of a photographer and a writer aren’t so terribly different. As editors of the website Sight Unseen, our role is to look at the world through a lens of our own making, gathering people’s stories. The photography that accompanies these written works on Sight Unseen could well stand on its own, but we’ve become accustomed to presenting images as source material to illustrate and interpret our stories. We seldom have the chance to put the imagery first. For our presentation on Bite! magazine this week, we seized the opportunity to do just that, reaching out to photographers with a keen narrative sense of their own. The series they present here are poignant visual essays with no need for translation. Many of the photographers we chose are documentarians, who peer into the lives of everyday people and record what they find there, the others are multidisciplinary artists with a gift for storytelling and creative composition.
Former editors at I.D. Magazine (the design magazine), writers Jill Singer and Monica Khemsurov are the co-founders of Sight Unseen, a new journalistic and curatorial consultancy.
Weblink: sightunseen.com
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Our poll "A photo essay always needs a great written story" closed. 267 people voted, 28% agrees, 72% disagrees. 233 people answered our follow-up question "Are you a photographer?" 82% indicated they are, 18% said no. Initially, negative answers to question #1 were almost 100% as was the pecentage of photographers among respondants. Then, when the level of non-photographers started to rise, the percentage of people indicating good text is always essential started to rise too. This seems to indicate that non-photographers think that adding good text to your photo essays is essential. In my opinion: if you want non-photographers to dig your work, you know what to do...
I have a fascination with the Oregon Trail – the purpose it served in American history and the seemingly endless possibilities it symbolized for the hundreds of thousands of pioneers who traversed the almost year-long and extremely grueling, sometimes deadly course. I’ve started to loosely travel this course, winding from Missouri to Western Oregon. The photographs created from this project will serve as a document of the modern Oregon Trail–what stands in these territories today, both its people and its places – and what has resulted from the possibilities of America’s great western migration.
The project is a cultural commentary born out of my frequent disappointment with that which is considered to be American “progress.” This isn’t simply a project to show what’s around the Oregon Trail today, but instead a project about what its appearance tells us about ourselves as a people and a culture.
Manifest Destiny – a feeling of divinely ordained entitlement to the land and its resources, a blessed
situation in which mistakes seemed impossible and possibilities seemed limitless – was not only a massive driving force for the western expansion of the United States in the mid 1800’s, but quickly became a prevailing and lasting American mentality. Many national and global issues have arisen from this ‘no consequence’ mentality and have created a way of life we must now rethink.
At its broadest sense, this project is about documenting an American lifestyle at a turning point, using as its setting one of the geographical pathways that most defined American idealism.
This project is very much a work in progress.
Mark Mahaney (1979) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Click weblink markmahaney.com or browse our archives
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Posted in category 82
Image No. 8 defines and hints at an underlying conflict between religion and culture, something central to the American story. Good eye, Mr Mahaney, good eye.
I really don’t want to be a spoilsport but as you base yourself on the history of the Oregon Trail and speak of American idealism – will the work in progress also touch the subject of the original inhabitants? How they see this turning point if there are any left in those regions?
Just curious, not hateful…