The Making of Fictional Photo Stories on Medium
An interview with photographer Richard “Koci” Hernandez
“Reading now. At first glance, WOW! Floored.”
I woke up to this email a few weeks back and immediately broke into a big, dumb grin. The note came from a photographer who doesn’t care much for words, and it referenced a draft of a story I’d forwarded him the night before. “I’d be stunned, too,” I thought to myself. And then I imagined him crying. I almost had.
Now you can read the story as well. Wait—make that three stories. They were published on Medium here, here, and here over the last three days. If the five of us behind this project may coin a term, you can call them Fictional Photo Stories. That photographer? He’s Richard “Koci” Hernandez, and together with the writers Spencer Strub, Melissa Graeber, and Peter Prato, we set out to weave Koci’s etherial, ambiguous photos into pieces of short fiction. And to push ourselves, we set just one rule: we only used images that have appeared in Koci’s Instagram feed.
This project is a bit of a mashup, but as far as resurrecting the photo essay goes, its origins are pure. In November, an editor at Medium asked me to help bring a photo story onto the platform. Medium’s editorial team was curious to learn how photographers use and value the tools, and this project emerged from the ensuing conversations.
For my part, I took copious notes on our process and drafted a how-to guide to creating visual stories on Medium. As we entered the final stretch of editing, I also interviewed Koci about his experience on the project. Our conversation is below. I’ve edited the transcript for clarity.
JACKSON: At the beginning of this project, you told me this : “If I could write, I would write, but that’s what I can’t do. I think the artists I respect the most are writers.” So I’m curious: despite your respect for writers, how did it feel to give three people you’d never worked with free rein to interpret your images?
KOCI: You know, I suspect this felt natural to me because we’re already living in a culture of sharing. It’s a given that, in some sense, I’m already giving my work away to people to interpret. I don’t think I would have said this before the internet. I think I had a deeper feeling of ownership over my work then, even of tightly held possession. But now sharing feels extremely natural. In a way, I do it every day with other people’s work. I take work I see on the internet and internalize it. Mentally I’m creating stories or getting inspiration.
Tied into this here, you have a long history in photojournalism. How did it feel to have fictional stories, instead of journalistic ones, written about your work?
I think Melissa’s piece feels a little more on the spectrum of fiction than the others. Spencer’s and Peter’s feel almost like they could be documentary stories, because they’re grounded in little snippets of reality. But overall, as a journalist it’s a little uncomfortable.
My images have always been tied to a truth, a journalistic truth. My images were always coupled with eyewitness accounts, people’s interviews, etcetera. The photography I have on Instagram is different though. The images in these stories are certainly documentary in style—they’re everyday street pictures—but the difference is that my intent was less journalistic.
This entire process, from inception, was always a bit of an unknown experiment. It was like: “I’m going to mix these two things, and I don’t know what’s going to happen, nobody has mixed them before, I haven’t mixed them before, and it could end up like that Mentos experiment, Mentos and Coke, where it’s going to explode in my face.” But these images were just tied to my general, everyday life, so it wasn’t so much of a stretch.
I remember something else you were saying when we first started off. You said that, with your photos, you’re trying to express a broad cultural mood. They’re not very meaningful individually, but together they speak to life in the Bay Area, if not our national culture. You also talked about transitions, about your images representing beginnings and endings. And finally—and most surprising to me—you said you consider your images hopeful. Do you think those intentions come through in these stories?
Yes. But they are three very different stories. In some sense, I think Melissa’s particularly nails a tight conjunction of what I try to bring, with an ethos and emotions. When I read Spencer’s and Peter’s, I’m like: Oh, the overall message could be many things. It depends on how you want to take it. And interestingly, that’s very much in line with what photography is.
We have these two different forms of communication where, you know, writers and photographers, they often have different intentions. For me personally, marrying the images to the words, the door blew open on what these things could mean. When you mix these together, and when I read, and then look, I think those connections in our brains really start firing. I think it’s more open to interpretation.
That’s fascinating. Do you view the images that the writers chose differently now that they’ve been put in stories?
Oh, absolutely. And this is why I wanted to participate in this experiment so much. I will never be able to view any of the images used in this experiment the same way again. Now they have a double meaning. When I shot them, and looked at them and presented them, it was all about my interpretation, my intent, my hope for what these images might be. And that’s generally where it ended. Even on social media, it’s usually, “Great picture!” “Love it!” an emoticon, or maybe “How did you do that?” But I’ve never had a comment that says, “I look at this photograph and it makes me think of this interaction between me and my father.”
Before, when I went back and looked at my Instagram work, as I often do, they evoked that original emotion and my original intent. But now, it’s like “Woah!” Now they’re tied to characters, and these quite detailed stories.
For me, photography is a brief glance in a mirror. It’s fleeting, like if you’re brushing your teeth and you just kinda look at yourself real quick and you’re done. But have you ever had that experience where instead of just catching yourself in the mirror and looking away, you actually just stop for, like, five minutes, and you just look at yourself in the mirror, and you freak yourself out? I don’t know if you’ve ever done that, but sometimes I do! And ultimately, that experience, that’s what I think I experienced with these stories—a deeper looking, a longer staring into the mirror. It gave me more time with my photographs, gave them different meaning. And I love it, I absolutely love it. Especially older work, it’s like uncovering buried treasure. It’s like a time capsule, the way it’s made me reimagine and re-look at my work. It has been very surprising, very enlightening, verging on the addictive.
I have to be honest, I can’t tell if this was intentional or not, but the layout on Medium left me breathless. The scrolling on certain images, where you see the image, and at the same time the image blurs into the background and you get the story, that’s almost like the third element, the third piece to this puzzle, that I never thought would be important.
I think the technology is a player in this experiment, and I never thought it would be. It’s a very small thing, a very subtle thing, but it’s a powerful thing. To have the image fade into the back that way is very powerful. And it seemed to me that the words the writers were using on top of the images that blurred, they were almost these little vignettes. They’re almost like an experience in and of themselves. Honestly, that was very enlightening.
I’ll have to tell that to the designers!
The ultimate goal is that kind of immersion. It’s the immersion that a photographer hopes to bring to an image—that people will want to stare at it. And a writer hopes the audience is living the story in their head. I think these stories work at that level.
In that vein, can you tell me how these images are integrated differently compared to traditional photo stories. What’s the difference between this and a traditional photo story in terms of the role of the images?
For me, a photo story, even if it had a fair amount of words attached to it, in my world there was always a segregation of words and pictures. The photo essays generally lived on pages by themselves where the images were all squished together, and there was beautiful design, a big lead picture, then some supplementary images around it. The message was: Here’s the picture story, and here’s the word story. An elegant intermixing of words and images, it’s not that it never happened, but it wasn’t the norm.
This was a very different experience in the sense that you only get parts of the picture. It’s very slow. You get to see the cover image, and then you get to experience words, then another picture, then a photo with the overlay effect, but you never get a sense of all of the pictures together. I think that’s very powerful. It sets up a mystery about what’s next. It feeds into the user continuing to want to scroll and experience the story.
It’s funny, over the holidays I had my parents read Spencer’s story, and they never scrolled up. And I was kind of hoping for that, but when it happened, I was like: Yes. It’s working. Compared to a traditional print layout, where designers are just trying to get people to pay attention, this was working differently. Here you get to assume the reader is paying attention because they wouldn’t have clicked on the story in the first place. And then all you need to do is tell the story.
Anyhow, I’ve got one more question. How did you like using Medium as a platform for photo stories? Don’t feel compelled to shill here, but were there things that were helpful or unhelpful?
Honestly, no shilling, it’s very hard to go wrong when you create the internet version of the little black dress. You ask a fashion designer to critique a black dress, and they’re going to go, well, uhh, what can I say? It’s simple, it’s straight forward—it’s timeless. To me, that’s the biggest thing: a simple and elegant treatment of pictures and words. There are no leg warmers here. No spandex.
Theres nothing in the presentation of Medium that, 10 or 15 years from now, that we’re going to cringe about. The presentation is timeless. My daughter, when she’s my age, I want her to stumble upon this creation and look at it and be immersed, and not go, “Oh, my gosh—it looks like this was done in 2014!” That’ll make me happy.
Honestly, I don’t know how anyone in the future is going to critique this little black dress of internet presentation. It’s hard to say anything negative when it gives so much attention to the story and the images.
Oh gosh, that’s good to hear!
It’s very true! I call things like I see them. I can be critical. But to your first question, this is one of the very few things where I say, If I could write myself, I’d be doing it! It’s inspired me to maybe give writing a shot. It’s made me more attracted to bringing this world of words to my images. It’s something I’m going to experiment with.
