J. Sybylla Smith, In Conversation With Preston Gannaway
“Attention is the beginning of devotion.
Real attention needs empathy; attention without feeling is just a report.”
Episode #67, Summary
Remember Me is a concentric ring of love stories capturing the twenty-year evolution of a family through the eyes of its youngest member.
Episode Notes
Photojournalist Preston Gannaway won a Pulitzer Prize for her poetic photography documenting a New Hampshire family coping with a young mother's illness and death. Remember Me is her breathtakingly graceful and intimate chronology of EJ over the intervening years since he lost his mother at 3 years of age. Gannaway masterfully transcends one family's journey to speak to the universal touchstones of life, love, loss, and the abiding ties that bind.
In this conversation, Preston discusses, among other things:
Observation as a superpower
Finding a photograph
Parameters of storytelling
Intuitiveness and nuance
Consent & collaboration
Photojournalism
Documentary tradition
Community journalism
A prologue of images
Hindsight
Capturing presence in the absence
Taking away the ‘fever pitch’
Defining objectivity
An empathic eye
Editing and sequencing
Funding projects
Big, weighty things
Referenced in the episode:
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
Opinion Essay, I Spent 17 Years Photographing One Family’s Grief and Growth NYTimes Sept 2, 2023
Women Photograph + Leica Grant
Economic Hardship Reporting Project
Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia
San Francisco International Airport Museum
Experiences of Grief: A Phenomenological Survey, 2020
A sting In the tale: weaving with nettles helped turn grief into joy
Long Life: Essays and Other Writings by Mary Oliver
Published by GOST Books
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