Zack Canepari is an American filmmaker and photojournalist from Northern California.  Zack started his career working as a photojournalist in India and Pakistan for Panos Pictures in 2007.  In 2010 he partnered with Drea Cooper, another filmmaker, and started the California is a Place website which became a platform for them to tell unique stories from their home state.  The series showed at Sundance and led them to produce commercials and other editorial content under the ZCDC moniker.

Through the success of California is a Place Canepari and Cooper were led to the story of Claressa Shields, a young female boxer from Flint, Michigan, who was training for the 2012 Olympics, the first year women boxing was included.  The documentary captured the strain of expectation and pressures that are put on someone ‘successful’ from a place like Flint.  Over the course of the film, you not only see Claressa’s growth, but you also see the growth of Zack and Drea as filmmakers.  Their cinematography and approach to storytelling progresses so much throughout the runtime of the film.  The film allows you to watch them learn their craft through just doing it, something I respect greatly.  The project was also a testament to their commitment to their work.  Getting the project funded seemed to be a huge hurdle for them, but they were able to keep their perspective on why it was important to push forward when it didn’t seem possible.  That ability to tune out the doubt, which I’m sure they had, and focus on the importance of the story is something that can’t be taught and they were able to push through, ultimately creating a film that told a powerful story.

I started to follow Zack’s work in 2011, well before I had considered the possibility of filmmaking as a career and right in the midst of his work on T-Rex.  Even then I thought it was incredibly lucky for a filmmaker to find a story so ripe with natural tension and the possibility of such an amazing outcome as a Olympic Gold Medal.  The idea of trying to capture such a story was overwhelming to think about at the time and I’m still in awe of how they fostered such a close relationship with Claressa and her community.  It is that skill, the ability to make a real human connection and then reflect that in the work that I respect Zack for the most.  He obviously respects his subjects and connects with them before capturing their life.  It must be incredibly rewarding for him at a personal level and the depth it brings to his work is obvious.   It is that humility that I hope to bring to my own work.

His time on T-Rex connected him to the Flint community a few years before the water crisis there.  Since then, he’s developed Flint is a Place, a reboot of his earlier work in California.  This platform showcases a more journalistic approach and reflects his more recent work with the New York Times.  Photos, film, audio, graphics and platform design weave seamlessly together to tell unique stories through the eyes of Flint residents.  This is where I want my own work to go and I feel that he is pushing the boundaries of how to tell impactful stories through the use of multiple different mediums.

Not only does his work in Flint pushing the boundaries of storytelling, it really shows how Zack approaches his work.  He truly believes he must live and breathe with the people/stories he covers.  Since California is a Place, much of his work has been focused on communities he is a part of.  When asked why he stopped working overseas, he replied:  

It’s a change of pace for me, for sure, but I realize the more I work in the Western World is that I have no business working on projects in distant, far-off places. I don’t know shit about those places. I’m always impressed when people can make great work about places they are just exploring for the first time. The best work, in my experience, tends to take place in the place that you know best. For me, at this stage, that’s in California.

Since then, he has moved from California to Michigan where he has spent his time developing relationships with the community in Flint.  Living with the people there and gaining their trust so he can better shine light on their perspective.  His ability to do this stems from his genuineness.  He approaches people in a way that doesn’t make them feel used or manipulated and in turn they allow him into their life.  The practice of clarity and humanity is powerful.   

For someone with such a successful career, Zack is pretty hard to pin down.  His online presence is limited to a few canned blurbs via his agency and sony bios, a website that doesn’t quite work and a neglected instagram and twitter feed.  I think this is the most important and inspiring thing about Zack.  He doesn’t seem to care about the press he gets or how many likes his photos are getting online.  Instead he seems to quietly grind it out and allowing his work to speaks for itself.  This is pretty refreshing in a time where journalists are romanticized and idolized and a photographer/filmmaker’s brand is almost more powerful than the stories they are telling.  Zack seems to keep the focus on what is in front of his camera and makes sure he doesn’t get in the way.  His calculated invisibility is his most powerful storytelling technique.

Recently, he signed with VII, a photo agency founded by some of the best photojournalists of our time.  The agency’s members focus their time on some of the world’s most complicated and intense issues.  I’ve always had deep respect and admiration for their work and I look forward to how this will amplify Zack’s voice and the voice of all his subjects.

Brady Holden isn’t a household name and his documentaries aren’t streaming on Netflix (at least, I don’t think), but he has been a major source of inspiration for me. It’s safe to say I wouldn’t be going to grad school for multimedia journalism if not for his influence. When we met four years ago, I had never before heard somebody introduce themselves as a filmmaker. I had creative hobbies growing up, and I enjoyed watching movies as much as the next kid, but I never gave the film much thought as a viable career path. Sound, lighting, angles, exposures; I found it all too intimating. Brady, on the other hand, was making home movies in the local cemetery with his Hi8 camcorder by the time he was in elementary school. While studying experimental film at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he discovered a passion for documentary filmmaking that he carries forward today as he carves out a niche as a freelance videographer and filmmaker in Portland.

Highlights of Brady’s portfolio include shooting on the feature-length documentary Circus Without Borders, an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, and a series of short travel videos, including this video homage to Chile published on OutsideOnline.com:

In addition, he runs The Exposure, a Portland-based, monthly series of documentary film screenings. The mission of The Exposure is to host screenings of documentaries in venues related to the social challenges or issues raised in the film. the series seeks to revive the intimate shared experience of enjoying cinema in a public venue, among members of a community bound by the same hopes and fears.

Brady and I have collaborated on three film projects for Columbia Land Trust in recent years. I chatted with him briefly to connect, commiserate, and learn more about his approach to his craft.

Brady considers himself a shooter first and foremost. “I love being the person who captures that most beautiful image,” he says. “I enjoy being in the field and filming hand-held and using my body to find compelling vantages.” In addition to the act of filming, Brady has come to savor the exhilaration of landing new projects, citing how satisfying it is when months or even years of discussing opportunities culminate in getting selected for something big and exciting.

Editing is an entirely different matter. I noted the weariness in his voice as he explained the challenges the editing can present.  “It’s challenging for me in some projects, but those are usually the ones where you grow the most.” He acknowledged that one can learn a tremendous amount about their strengths and weaknesses as a shooter by editing their own stuff and encouraged me to try editing someone else’s footage to truly appreciate the difference.  “It’s easy to fall in love with your own shots, so you’ve got to remember the big picture, the one sentence explaining what the story is about. You also need time to be still, focused, and dedicated.

When asked about getting over concerns about being intrusive with his camera, Brady explained that after a few shoots, most new filmmakers get over this fear after they see how much it limits the quality of their work. It’s easy to see from the Chile video that he’s adept at capturing great details, both with human faces and hands and with textures and wildlife (see 0:11, o:27). He also noted the importance of establishing the expectation that the camera will get close up. “Spending time with your subject while you’re out from behind the camera can go a long way in making both you and your subject comfortable. It can be stressful, but sometimes putting the camera down to interact face-to-face during a shoot can pay off with better footage the rest of the way. ”

It was by producing film projects like A River Reborn with Brady that I discovered the awesome power of the moving image to tell vivid, compelling stories. My hope for my time in the MMJ program is to become a story producer, and perhaps, with enough practice, a competent shooter and editor as well.

Being into the stories. Or being the story itself.

It’s a tough choice but also the best way to feel a story and make people empathize with it.

Fabrizio Gatti knows how to do so. He is an Italian investigative journalist and author who has chosen to live almost all the stories he wants to write about. His preferred investigation method is passing as one of the people of the stories he chooses. He wants to feel what they really feel before even talking about feelings.

I can safely say there’s no one else in Italy who has done the same.

Fabrizio writes for the Italian weekly L’Espresso and his reportage and undercover investigations have been translated all over the world.

“Investigation journalism is the epitome of journalism”, he says. “It’s different from daily news reporting. Of course, daily news reporting is something important for the community, but it happens everywhere, even in regimes. On the contrary, regimes don’t allow investigative journalism. Because it’s the expression of freedom. And we need to fight for it.”

Fabrizio Gatti has travelled most of the routes of immigration into Europe.

Between 2003 and 2007 he also crossed the Sahara desert four times with hundreds of migrants, infiltrated a gang of human traffickers in Northern Africa as a gangster’s personal driver, was rescued at sea, was jailed in the Lampedusa detention centre as an Iraqi illegal migrant, and worked as a slave labourer on a tomato farm in Italy.

His number one inspiration is Richard Kapuscinki. Kapuscinski believed that news is all about political struggle and the search for truth, not profits and ratings as is invariably the case today. Fabrizio is a kindred spirit.

• He follows in Kapuscinski’s footsteps with a book called Bilal, on the road with illegal immigrants, an odyssey into the heart of darkness.

The stories told in this book are not some melodramatic made-for-TV docu-drama, they’re real stories that oblige you to think about the issue of forced migration. Fabrizio introduces us to illegal migrants not as a danger, but as people in danger.

I must admit that for me this book is compelling reading partly because of that human fascination with the ghoulish. The horror of what one man can do to another raises the question, what one man can do, so can another.

Bilal exposes a new kind of genocide.

• In 2010 he wore a neoprene wetsuit and went to Sardinia to investigate a case of corruption and maritime pollution involving the Italian government.

He dived into the water of La Maddalena gulf with a biologist and a GoPro camera. He wanted to see with his eyes what was happening there.

With “La grande bugia di Bertolaso” Fabrizio makes you dive into the sea through his eyes.

Once again: collecting information from experts is not enough for Fabrizio. He has to see and touch what’s going on, he needs to collect proof for himself. He becomes part of the story, and that’s how he builds trust.

• “Un unico destino” is his last work.

It’s a journalistic investigation designed for different platforms: an article for the newspaper L’Espresso, a web series of 5 episodes and a 52 minutes docu- film about the boat with hundreds immigrants aboard that sank in the Mediterranean sea the night of October 11^th 2013. This is the biggest loss of civilian life involving the Italian Navy: 268 deaths, 60 of them children.

Here’s the documetary trailer:

This time Fabrizio wasn’t there, so he found a new way to tell what happened.

He tells the story of three Syrian doctors who survived the tragedy, but lost their families. They now have new lives and jobs in Europe but the pain is still there. As well as the guilt of having killed their own children in an attempt to escape the war.

That day has definitely changed the official rules of engagement in the Mediterranean sea.

• With this initiative posted on his blog, Fabrizio goes beyond journalism and takes a side. Once again we see Kapuscinski’s style in the way the post is written.

It’s a human and heart-breaking piece about Lampedusa, an Italian island much closer to the North African coast than to Sicily and the rest of Italy. It has taken on an outsize role in the debate over illegal immigration, becoming, for many in Italy and across Europe, the face of the migrant crisis and the conduit for exporting Arab instability across the Mediterranean.

Fabrizio Gatti has been also rescued there as an immigrant. Rescued and helped by local people.

“Fortress Europe” is his website.

He defines himself a traveler, writer, blogger and indipendent journalist from Tuscany.

Gabriele Del Grande, 35 years old, founded his blog in 2006 to tell “Le storie che fanno la storia”, the stories that make history. The website is an Observatory on the victims of the borders, a diary that keeps tracks of people who struggle to build a better life, who escape from a war, who look for a chance to live with dignity.

He analyzes numbers: how many people are moving? How many of them die? How many get arrested because they don’t have a visa? How many stay and how many have to leave?

“Six years of travelling around the Mediterranean along the borders of Europe. In search of the stories that make history. The history that will be studied by our children who will read on the school text books that in 21st century thousands died at sea around Italy and thousands were arrested and deported from our cities. Whilst everybody pretended not to see.” That’s written on the blog’s homepage. He has proofs of what he says.

3 years ago he realized with Antonio Augugliaro e Khaled Soliman Al Nassiry the docu-film “On the bride’s side” based on a real story.

The documentary tells a story that Gabriele has built up and it’s just an example of the way he works. And makes the difference.

Gabriele and his friend decide to help five Palestinians and Syrians, who entered Europe via the Italian island of Lampedusa, complete their journey to Sweden. They’re escaping from the war in Syria, they need to avoid getting themselves arrested as traffickers. In order to do so, they decide to fake a wedding party

With a Palestinian friend dressed up as the bride and other Italian and Syrian friends as wedding ‘guests’, they race across the face of Europe on a four-day journey of 3,000 kilometres.

The trip collects stories of hopes and dreams of the protagonists, but also reveals a special side of Europe that is supportive and encouraging. A Europe that ridicules the laws and restrictions of the so-called ‘Fortress Europe’.

“It all started as a joke” says Gariele in an interview with Al Jazeera,” we were having dinner at our friend Antonio Augugliaro’s house, who is a film director and editor. We were talking about Abdallah’s story and I suddenly came out with it; “You know who the border guards would never stop? A wedding party! The police would never check a bride’s documents!”

Again, what makes Gabriele unique is not only his competence in finding stories and tell them. He knows how to build them up.

Fortress Europe is a privileged point of view on the Mediterranean sea, a window to look at people hunting for dignity.

There are also thirty photographs that Gabriele collected in Tunis. Pictures of young men. Some in colour, some black and white. These pictures were handed to him by their families. They wanted Gabriele to publish them and ask if anyone has seen them in Italy, in the CIEs or in prison or in any other place. Gabriele kept them stored in an envelope inside a notebook with names and dates of birth written in pen, in Arabic.

He published the pictures. On the blog he asks the readers to make an effort by trying to look into these eyes and learn to pronounce their names. And celebrate them. Because they’re probably dead and they’re not only victims. They’re martyrs “fallen in this dirty war of borders. Rebel heroes of a spontaneous civil disobedience movement against unjust border laws and against the criminalization of free movement.”

These faces will be part of the collections in the museum of emigration that will one day open in Lampedusa, like today at Ellis Island in the USA. “Let’s make sure that, from today, these young people have not die in vain.”

Gabriele is a good storyteller who shakes consciences, mine included.

Brandon Stanton is the founder of the blog Humans of New York (HONY), which, as the name suggests, is about the people who inhabit New York City. Stanton interviews people at random on the streets of NYC, who often share intimate details about their lives – most of the time, they are not identified by

Brandon Stanton, St. Martin’s Press

their full names. The series has proven to be exceptionally popular: In fewer than seven years, HONY has drawn nearly 18 million followers on Facebook, over 7 million on Instagram, and Stanton has 730,000 followers on Twitter. He’s published bestselling selections of those stories and has even started a video series, an example of which I plan on highlighting in another blog post.

Stanton doesn’t provide much information about himself on his website – the content is almost entirely composed of his work. Under the “About” section of the website, Stanton says: “Humans of New York began as a photography project in 2010. The initial goal was to photograph 10,000 New Yorkers on the street, and create an exhaustive catalogue of the city’s inhabitants.” He also notes that his first entries were solely photos of his subjects, but he would later add quotes to help creative a narrative. That’s pretty much he all he says about his background.

I took a shot and emailed Brandon Stanton with some questions about his work (if he somehow finds the time to reply, I will definitely make sure to update my blog post). Short of him responding, Stanton has given plenty of interviews to various outlets, especially from 2013 on as the popularity of his blog has surged.

Stanton is one of the many people who could be considered part of today’s ever-growing group of non-traditional content creators who had an idea and harnessed the power of the Internet to make it happen. According to this in-depth interview he gave to NPR a couple years ago, Stanton previously worked in finance in Chicago, but lost his job and decided he was going to move to New York and conduct a “photographic census” of the people there. So he did.

One of the many aspects I find inspiring about Stanton is that he was never a journalist by trade – he was a hobbyist photographer who had an idea he was passionate about and made it happen. I also admire, and envy, his ability to walk up to   random people on the street, strike up a conversation, and make a strong enough connection that people are willing to share their personal and often painful details about their lives. Talking to Michel Martin for NPR’s All Things Considered show, Stanton

“We met six months ago at a dance night. His wife passed away three years ago. I’d been married for thirty years and gotten divorced. It was just nice to have someone to talk to. We have so much in common. My ex-husband only wanted to stay home and watch TV. But we do all sorts of things together: walk around the city, go to museums, travel.”
“Have sex.”
“Hush.”
“What? We’re still young.”
Brandon Stanton/Humans of New York

admits that approaching strangers and getting comfortable handling rejection are the most difficult parts of producing HONY. “I was terrified at first,” he tells Martin. “But over time, you know, I realized it’s not really about what you say when you approach a stranger, it’s all about the energy that you’re giving off.” He also gives good advice for choosing person-on-the-street interview subjects (look for someone sitting on a bench who doesn’t appear to be in a hurry) and a nice perspective on why people are willing to open up to him (“I think that if you ask with a genuine interest and a genuine curiosity and a level of compassion, there’s very little that someone won’t share with you.”).

Since beginning the blog in 2010, Stanton has expanded beyond NYC and has gone to other parts of the country and parts of the world to tell people’s stories. Often, there is some sort of timeliness to the trip, or he goes to places he feels are misunderstood by Americans. Last year, Stanton headed to Rio de Janeiro before the Summer Olympics. After the 2016 presidential election, he went to Macomb County in Michigan, which went heavily to Trump. The year before that, he traveled to Iran. Most recently, Stanton was in Russia, interviewing people there as America’s relationship with the former superpower grows ever more adversarial. Sometimes he will take on more of an activist role and use a series to highlight a specific issue or raise funds for a cause. He has produced series on pediatric cancer, Syrian refugees, and prison inmates, to name a few.

Stanton’s posts don’t always feature such heavy content, however. He adds levity to the site with a periodic series called “Today in Microfashion,” which usually features a cute kid in some kind of funky or dapper outfit – no quotes needed. Sometimes the post will be a brief humorous anecdote about what happened during someone’s day . No matter what the post is about, Stanton has an uncanny ability to make his subject’s personality shine through his photo selections.

What I like most about Stanton and his work, and likely the reason why so many other people gravitate toward his blog as well, is that no matter where he is taking photos or whom he’s talking to, the subjects people discuss on HONY are often ones we can relate to at some level. Troubles at work. Falling in and out of love. Existential crises. Mourning the loss of a loved one. Stanton’s bailiwick is finding the universal truth no matter where he is in the world, thereby connecting all of us, and offering a much-needed reminder that despite cultural differences, we all have shared experiences that bind us together as human beings.