Mississippi river Basin PRoject

Fishing in Bayou Sorrel, Louisiana, a part of the Mississippi River basin. Image © Rory Doyle and used with permission by the photographer. Sharing or reuse of this image prohibited.

Fishing in Bayou Sorrel, Louisiana, a part of the Mississippi River basin. Image © Rory Doyle and used with permission by the photographer. Sharing or reuse of this image prohibited.

The Nature Conservancy works throughout the Mississippi River basin on conservation efforts to protect freshwater, mitigate flooding impact, and helping to maintain natural areas and ecosystems along the water’s edge. The basin is also home to a rich diversity of people and places. Grant money had been allocated to produce creative assets around this project and our photo team knew we had a deadline to produce the work during the height of the Covid pandemic. This severely restricted how any potential assignments could be executed, including no air travel, no overnight stays at hotels, and no indoor documentation. However, because of these limitations I was able to envision a more personal storytelling experience in which local photographers were assigned to locations within the basin to both tell the central themes surrounding the work of TNC as well as the many ways in which the waters have informed how we live our lives.

 

My role as lead photo editor for this project was to research the project alongside our text team, develop a multi-photographer strategy, research a variety of photographers around the country whose vision and perspective would work harmoniously as a body of work and work with my photo team to divide the photo production work up within the team. I produced a single assignment with photographer Rory Doyle for the first of this two-part feature, and my fellow editors produced and photographed six smaller assignments for the photo essay portion of the story. We all worked with design on print layout.

During that time, we knew that we also wanted a larger online photo essay of all of the work, so I became certified to author webpages via our AEM content management system and built, edited, and wrote the online photo essay, How The Water Shapes Us. This story and the supplemental online article have been well-received by our members, colleagues, and those in the photojournalism industry. We intend to use this model on other priority projects for the magazine in the future. In addition, this project yielded over 500 new photos for use by our organization, including for regions that had not been extensively photographed in the past by this team.