American literary magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review's (VQR) experiment to tell stories through Instagram stands out amidst the attempts of publications to use social media
This story based in India is about an experience at a cotton farm
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American literary magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review's (VQR) experiment to tell stories through Instagram stands out amidst the attempts of publications to use social media.
In this experiment, they share a holding picture, accompanied by text, which tells a story creatively in less than 400 words. Over four-five such posts, a narrative is formed. "The seed for this project was planted more than a year ago, during conversations I was having with the magazine's current curators —Jeff Sharlet and Neil Shea. Neil has been doing Instagram journalism for a while, building dispatches of his reporting assignments for National Geographic.
Jeff was actively exploring ways of trying to tinker with the app, recognising that it had great application as a tool for documentary of the everyday. I was interested in finding an alternative to the long-form bandwagon. And the more we discussed it, the more we realised there was tremendous potential here to deliver the elements of narrative reporting through the compression Instagram requires, thus creating a unique kind of pressure-cooker reading experience," explains Paul Reyes, deputy editor, VQR.
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The challenge, he adds, was to reconsider the relationship between the image and the text in a way that the image, in a way, becomes text. "The contributor — be it a writer or photographer — submits three to five entries of about 300 words each, accompanied by images. Then we publish the series one day at a time, for a week. The following week,
we reassemble the entries as a single, cohesive essay with the images, " he says.
The experiment began with 500 followers and has now reached 2,600 followers. Reyes says they are gearing up for more. "I'd also like to develop a rotation of Instagram columnists who cover a variety of subjects. Whether it has to do with critiquing a specific kind of experience, or covering a particular region of the world, or owning an area of interest," he signs off.
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