CRITICAL PHOTOJOURNALISM

Preston Gannaway is a Pulitzer Prize-winning documentary photographer and artist. Her work centers around intimate narratives about families and marginalized groups while examining the relationships between individual, community and landscape. Gannaway is best known for her long-form projects like Remember Me, which was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography. The project is now in its 19th year with a sold out book released in 2023. Her first book, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, is about the changing character of a seaside neighborhood in Virginia. 

Gannaway’s photographs and artist books are held in private and public collections including the High Museum of Art, Chrysler Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Duke University and Stanford University. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in venues around the world including the Everson Museum of Art, Griffin Museum of Photography, Ogden Museum of Southern Art and San Francisco International Airport Museum. In addition to long-form projects, she does commissions for publications and brands such as The New Yorker, WIRED, Airbnb and Rivian. Born and raised in North Carolina, she lives and works in Sonoma County, California.

The interview was lightly edited for clarity and length.

The Concord Monitor was this amazing small newspaper known for its ambitious community journalism. It was a well-respected paper for both writers and photographers to hone their skills, and I feel incredibly fortunate that I was able to work there. 

In 2006, Chelsea Conaboy, a reporter at the Monitor, had been given a lead on a story about a young couple who were fighting terminal cancer while raising three kids. And it was my turn for a project—a luck of the draw kind of thing. It’s incredible to think about that now: one of those seemingly small turns of events that literally change your life forever. And so, I was given this assignment—a feature story to work on over the next few months. Our photo editor Dan Habib was really great at doing intimate projects, but I struggled with it. I was really shy, and was drawn to this “fly on a wall” approach where I would just observe and not interact. This project was the beginning of my reorientation toward intimate work. Dan worked closely with me throughout the whole story; so much of what I know about long-form visual storytelling I learned from Dan. 

The first time I met Rich and Carolynne St. Pierre, I left my camera in the car. We just had a conversation. I think (and hope!) that’s pretty normal nowadays. But this was the first time I remember doing that. The foundation comes before the visuals, it’s important to talk about the process and start building the relationship. Starting slowly works out really well, I have found. 

I really liked Carolynne. She was pretty sick already at that time, but so sweet and funny—she just had a really easy presence. Carolynne made it easy for me to learn how to just hang out and be in a space with someone. It was obviously uncomfortable for her, too. I mean it’s always weird when you have a photographer there, but we learned how to do that together. I remember during one of my earliest shoots at their house, I came and sat at the table, and I said, “Oh, I'm just going to hang out. You just do whatever.” So she sat there for a few minutes reading the paper and then said, “This feels weird. Let’s just talk.” And so we just talked. 

Both the writer and I spent as much time at the house as we could, in between other assignments. I would tag along to doctor appointments or birthday parties—marking time with some sort of milestone or event. I still work this way, when possible. During more private moments, Chelsea and I were constantly checking in to make sure it was okay for us to be there or if they would like for us to step out. Initially, we were there a few times a month, but when Carolynne got really sick, we were there around the clock—especially over her last two days. 

This was just supposed to be a short feature story—following their lives as they were juggling treatments with soccer games and that sort of thing. But after the first story came out, Carolynne and Rich really got what we were doing. Carolynne said it felt like a true representative of what she was going through, and that if we kept going, it would be really valuable for the kids later on, after she was gone. So it was really that first published story that laid the groundwork for future stories. Chelsea and I went to our editors and asked if we could continue. I mean, why stop? And we got our editors on board. And then the access just evolved over time. We ended up doing five stories in print and an 18 minute audio slideshow over the course of about two years. 

When Carolynne died, we were both in the room with her. I hadn’t seen anyone die before. It was extraordinarily powerful – beyond any experience I’d ever had.  And it was such a privilege to witness and be a part of. If I had sat down with Carolynne that first day and said, “I want to be by your side with my camera during the last hours of your life,” there was just no way that she and Rich would have signed off on that. I think most people wouldn't agree to something like that. We had to build that relationship with them first. They allowed Preston and Chelsea to be there, but they wouldn't have necessarily allowed a newspaper photographer and journalist to be there. Right? It's because we knew them. It’s about that trust.

We spent the next eight months focusing on what happened afterwards. That was something that I felt strongly about. It had become almost a cliche, in a way, to see stories like these. Somebody's ill and then they die. And that's it. That's the end. It just seemed to me like such a superficial ending. I always wanted to know, what happens after that? In their case, the hardest, darkest time was after Carolynne was gone. The friends and family had gone back home to their lives, and Rich was left there trying to raise their three kids on his own and he’s just lost his soulmate. I really wanted to continue the story. In a sense, I've just never stopped. Eighteen years later, I'm still wondering what's going to happen next. When Carolynne died, her youngest, EJ, was only four years old. Would he remember her? Since the beginning, that question has always been a driving force behind this work. 

After the Monitor series was published, things were just a complete whirlwind. In early 2008, I moved across the country for a new job. The Pulitzer Prizes were announced on the very first day that I was scheduled to start at the Rocky Mountain News, so I flew back to New Hampshire for the announcement. Then the Great Recession hit. I was in Denver at the Rocky for about 10 months, until January 2009. It was pretty clear the paper was going to close, so luckily I was able to land a spot at The Virginian-Pilot. So I moved back across the country. For years after leaving the Monitor, I stayed in touch with Rich and would go back to see him and EJ. I would have my camera, but I didn't start photographing them seriously again until I left newspapers in 2013. I've always been attracted to longitudinal documentaries. The Up Series had a huge influence on me early on. And then the film Boyhood by Richard Linklater came out in 2014 around the time I had started focusing on the project again. I thought, “Okay, maybe I'm on to something,” because people loved that film. 

Since moving to California eleven years ago, I have traveled back to New Hampshire at least once or twice a year. Continuing to photograph Rich and EJ has been a way for the three of us to continue honoring Carolynne. The series is a living document that she started.  And it’s also a way I can stay in close contact with them and keep our relationship current. The older I get and the more I move around, the harder it is to stay in touch with people. Having a project tied to them forces a kind of urgency to it. And EJ is growing up and changing so quickly.

I’ll show EJ pictures sometimes, and he's like “Oh, that's cool,” and I'll photograph him with his girlfriend and send him the pictures. I have hundreds of thousands of photographs of him, but he doesn't really put that much thought into where they go. He's a college student – he’s got other things to think about. And Rich has been very supportive of the project the entire time. He says this is what Carolynne wanted—for her memory to be kept alive, and this project is a part of that. He's always encouraged me to continue. He just says, “You just do your thing.”

My partner, Nicole (Frugé), is my first set of eyes on the work. And she was sitting in the room for a lot of these pictures, which is funny. I would say, “Well, let's go to New Hampshire for vacation this summer! We'll go see EJ, I'll bring my camera and we'll go eat lobster rolls.” I have pictures of her and EJ fishing. It's very much a family thing, in that way. She definitely helps me edit, though. 

With a few important exceptions, I think of photojournalism as having a short shelf life because it's tied to a current event. You're there. You witness it. You photograph it. It's published in minutes. I'm much more interested in long form storytelling—critical pieces that inspire people to think as well as feel and are not tied to a news cycle or a news peg. But I love the accessibility of documentary photography and the news media’s potential for a wide audience. 

From the beginning of working with the St. Pierre family, I realized that the more sensitive and intimate the situation (and the better the “access” so to speak) the more veto power should be given. I felt hampered somewhat by traditional journalism ethics while I was at the newspaper, but felt freer as years went on and I worked with them purely on my own terms. Consent should be on-going, and communication should be open. It’s like any relationship - it’s a two-way street and I think it’s crucial to keep checking in. EJ knows that if he ever doesn’t want something photographed, or if he ever tells me something he wants just between us, that is perfectly fine. I think at times I’ve bugged him by so often reminding him of this! Whenever differences over the project arise with Rich or EJ, we’ve always been able to discuss it and compromise. Over the years that just adds to the trust and intimacy we’ve built. 

For many years, I didn’t know exactly what form the work would take and I was honest with them about that. It was a slow build. Aside from one or two small pieces, I basically worked for 15 years without anything being published. GOST Books, a publisher in London released Remember Me in 2023. The prologue includes a few of the early photographs from my time at the Monitor before Carolynne died, but the majority of the book is EJ growing up without her. The sequence ends around the time he graduates from high school. The regular edition of the book sold out in a few months. 

The book is mostly a mixture of portraits, still lives and landscapes. I still have a hard time directing Rich and EJ when I’m making a portrait. Those photojournalism tendencies are hard to shake! The photographs are made from my point-of-view, that’s a given. But now that EJ is older, he has more opportunities to speak about the project and his personal experience, when he wants. That has also enriched the project. 

This past spring, I had my first solo exhibition of Remember Me at the Chung 24 gallery here in San Francisco. I was able to fly EJ out from New Hampshire to see the show and do a gallery talk. It was his first time in San Francisco, so I got to play aunt. It was wonderful having him in the gallery space – but what was most memorable, and I’m pretty sure he’d agree, was touring him around: staying in a high rise hotel overlooking the Embarcadero and taking him fishing in the Russian River. 

One aspect that I’ve recognized over time, is that while working this way, the power dynamics shift between “subject” and “photographer.” There’s so much accountability in long-form work. I find that reassuring. Because this entire series centers around EJ, he has the power to bring it to an end at any point. So when people ask me how long I’ll continue this project, I say as long as EJ is willing, I’m in it till the end.