Associate professor Jim Kelly | Feb. 7, 2008
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| Courtesy photo by Chris Howell, The Herald-Times |
| Herald-Times photographer Chris Howell took this picture of Kristi Parkes of Bloomfield as she fought back the tears after storms destroyed her home. Howell’s photo essay, Pathways, appears weekly and features local people with stories to tell. |
He was not reporting the news, however. That story had already run in the morning’s paper and on the Web site. Instead, he was over in his old hometown looking for a subject for his community journalism project.
Howell did meet with students and showed them a year’s worth of his regularly appearing photo column, “Pathways.” Pathways is a front-page photo and short story package that “captures those little moments that add up to a lifetime of memories,” according to the column’s intro.
For Kristi Parkes of Bloomfield, one of those little moments was spent in the roofless attic of her family home. Howell had been with her much of Wednesday morning as she gathered photo albums and graduation gowns out of the closets of the house that had been hit by a tornado Tuesday night. She will be the subject of Howell’s column Monday. Coincidently, Chris went to high school with Kristi’s sister in Bloomfield 15 years ago.
Howell has been photographing and writing his column since spring of 2006. He roams the roads of the area looking for ordinary people with stories to tell about life in south central Indiana. His subjects range from tattoo artists in Bloomington to pork roasters at the 4-H Fair in Switz City to a gravedigger in Spencer. All can be seen at the newspaper’s Web site.
Some of his Pathways columns are also multimedia stories on the paper’s Web site. Howell conducts audio interviews and then produces a multi-photo slide show with subject narration and natural sounds. Howell stressed the importance of multimedia production to students hoping to be photojournalists.
“Sound adds so much to photographs,” he said. “It lets people tell their own story."
