Chris Vail is a multimedia designer who uses news and documentary material to create forms of interactive electronic storytelling. Currently he is an executive producer for Newsworks, a consortium of national newspapers.

Before coming to Newsworks. Vail, along with Sue Johnson and Allison Cornyn, created Picture Projects, a Web site that currently features the Bosnia photographs of Gilles Peress. This site was created to showcase documentary work that emanates from strong personal conviction and to provide a forum for personal dialogue between photographer and viewer.

The elements that make up this current project, "Farewell to Bosnia," include the images of Gilles Peress accompanied by excerpts of letters he wrote during the months spent photographing the Bosnian tragedy of violence. The material is personal and intimate and employs a design philosophy that emphasizes the poetry and emotional content that lies therein.

The site includes the responses of individuals who visited the traveling exhibition of these images curated by the Corcoran Museum in Washington D.C. In various locations, response rooms were set up to allow people to write letters to the people of Bosnia or tape themselves in a type of video confessional. A selection of those responses are presented in the site.(The site’s url: www.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu/~student/picture_projects/)

Vail:

We’ve attempted to use the Web to combine photography, sound, and text to create compelling narratives. To us, a narrative doesn’t necessarily have a plot, but it does have a strong emotional thread. I think we definitely succeeded with the Bosnia site. When we look at the site’s hit list we find that most of the people go all the way through the site 20-30 pages deep. This is unique for the Web because the average visit to a site is 3 pages deep. We are seeing people hooked on the story.

The amount of text we use is really minimal. But by parsing it out with the imagery and using the interplay between pictures and words, we’ve created a dynamic tension that seems to be very effective. Of course, the pictures do speak for themselves, but they speak in an ambiguous voice, which is the nature of a lot of photography. The words nail down meaning and give nuance to the imagery. Captions take a viewer in a lot of different directions, and the interplay between them and the images is a delicate balance between defining a moment and allowing it to play itself out.

For example, in the Bosnia stuff there is nothing in the narrative that relates directly to the images. There are two separate stories largely possible because Peress photos are really more like an open-ended conversation than a defining statement.

When we designed the site, we wanted it to have powerful words that came up and grabbed the viewers attention as they waited for the images to download. Even though we kept the image files small (30[en]50K) it still takes time for them to appear. We wanted to give the viewers the chance to use their imagination and make associations with other images in their minds--adding yet another cognitive layer to the piece.

To us it was very important to make it easy for a viewer to make their own connections throughout the piece. We wanted to create a space within the viewers' minds that allowed them to make associations. If we were effective, then 1 plus 1 actually equaled 3.

The Web medium is definitely limiting--with its low bandwidth and all that--but as publishers and artists we have to keep in mind that our power doesn’t come so much from the technology itself but from the way that we choose to put all the elements together.