Friday, January 1st, 2010
SOUL SEARCHING
BY SAM POLCER
ANDREW LIST
How do you define a place?
Is it best to approach it from the outside, arriving with fresh eyes and few preconceptions, or will only the inhabitants know its true nature? How many words will the definition take—can it be reduced to one catchy phrase, like “the city that never sleeps”? Will a good definition require a book a la Michener, Capote or Oates? Can it fit in a picture frame or on a DVD? Does a good melody make it stick? Let’s not forget travel magazines, which do their best to bring readers as close to a destination’s soul as you can get without a plane ticket—and only the most misguided say they capture its true essence.
As the media/technology/art landscape mutates beyond recognition, the answer to the first question above becomes obscured— though people continue to try to find it.
In 2007, for example, a contest organized by the Athens County Convention and Visitors Bureau asked people for 300-word responses to the question “How would you describe Athens County to a stranger?” Nature, culture and history were all cited in equal measure in the submissions, hinting at just how diverse Athens really is, though it’s clear even from the winning essays that it takes a lot more than 300 words to put a finger on this multifaceted community located about an hour southeast of Columbus, Ohio. That same year, the School of Visual Communication at the Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University took on a similar goal and launched the inaugural Soul of Athens (soulofathens.com) project.
Student photojournalists, filmmakers and writers headed into the field, photographing and interviewing residents, covering events and documenting everyday experiences in the city of Athens and its surrounding area. Each assignment resulted in its own multimedia essay, and for students, the opportunity to work in different formats (from text-heavy articles to photo slideshows to interactive maps) is what makes Soul of Athens so impressive.
“The multimedia approach gives you a whole new way to look at stories,” says Rachel O’Hara, a senior in the photojournalism department, whose “Anointed Praise” project in the 2009 version of Soul of Athens focused on a 25-member gospel choir at Ohio University. “My story had a lot of music involved, so for me to be able to include sound was really awesome.”
The Soul of Athens Web site is relaunched every year, compiling the students’ work into flashy, informative, immersive online experiences much more sophisticated than your average class project. It has been recognized in competition with professional sites and won a number of awards, including the top prize in the National Press Photographers Association’s “Best Use of the Web” category. That such a project can ever fully capture a place’s soul is debatable—that it was a shining example of how to use new technology in the attempt is not.
Now in its third year, the project has grown from a small endeavor by a few talented students into a part of the school’s annual course offerings. A student marketing team was even tasked with spreading the word, and the response—especially within the community of Athens—has been overwhelmingly positive.
“I was accepted with open arms by the people I interviewed and photographed,” says Joel Prince, whose project, “Growth,” profiled the Athens Community Food Initiatives garden. “We’ve developed a reputation in the community. People have seen the quality of the work, and they know it’s not just a student project— that it’s bigger than that.”
Because of the project, Athens County has inadvertently become one of the most heavily documented rural Appalachian areas in the U.S. It’s an in-depth look at the kind of place where beekeepers, gospel singers, high school football players, farmers and kayakers contribute to a rich tapestry that now includes a group of ambitious, investigative youngsters.
