A Teaching Thought:  I’ve often wondered why there isn’t more frequent “currency” between visual studies (particularly art history and photography) and the study of narrative journalism. Aside from the obvious synergy with documentary photography in Jacob Riis’ or James Agee’s work, or the example of Joan Didion’s fascination with surrealism, or Christo, Chagall, and others, the possible tie-ins are many. In the American orbits of narrative journalism, at least, there are many other examples one can think of: Stephen Crane’s famous interest in impressionism; Hemingway and modernist art; Tom Wolfe’s inspiration from a German arts “little magazine,”  Simplicissimus, devoted to caricature (as TW would be).

In the classroom, making these currents visible isn’t, I think, a matter of tracing rote matters of “influence.”  Rather, it’s about having students understand the artistry involved in a journalist’s conceptualizing, and helping a viewer or reader “picture,” large scale or often less-visible forces or consequences of social change. For that reason, some of my most positive experiences have come in juxtaposing (often via a student panel or online reflection) the “Great Migration” series of the African American painter Jacob Lawrence with a section of Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns (2010). Of course, I don’t assign the entirety of Wilkerson’s masterpiece–I select out a middle portion she titles “The Kinder Mistress,” which is about arriving in the North or West. But before we start on Wilkerson, I ask students to explore Lawrence’s work through a YouTube selection on the “Making of Great Migration Series” and posted panels of that great work. Students have often spoken about Wilkerson’s notions of the “epic,” the function of abstraction and collage and “cross-cutting,” Lawrence’s attempt to capture the phenomenological or sensory experience–the color and noise and movement, and sometimes sensory overload–often through immediate, primary, even childlike perception or memory. I’ve learned a lot from my students about how Wilkerson’s art parallels and departs from these modes.

I would love to hear from others about such experiments in narrative journalism and the visual arts.