Photo essay examples: 11 famous essays and how to plan your own

Smith spent several weeks in August 1948 with Dr. Ernest Ceriani, a general practitioner in Kremmling, Colorado, a thinly populated ranching area in the Rockies. The essay follows him through house calls, surgery and late nights. One famous frame shows Ceriani walking through a field with his bag under a heavy sky. Another shows him in a kitchen, exhausted, after a Caesarean in which both mother and baby died.

What it teaches: one character can carry an essay, and the low point is what readers remember. Stay until the subject stops performing for you.

Smith persuaded his editors to let him profile Maude Callen, a Black nurse midwife working in rural South Carolina, and kept her schedule for weeks, from before dawn into the evening. Reader donations helped build her a clinic, which opened in Pineville in May 1953.

What it teaches: a working day is the simplest narrative spine, and one person moves readers more than a statistic does.

Burrows flew with a Marine helicopter squadron in Vietnam on a single mission on March 31, 1965. The essay runs from takeoff to a landing zone under fire, where the wounded co-pilot of another helicopter is pulled aboard and dies, and ends back at base with the grief of the door gunner, Lance Farley.

What it teaches: the tightest narrative covers hours, not weeks. Keep strict chronology and give the emotional climax its own space after the action.

Parks pitched LIFE a story on gang wars in Harlem, then spent a week driving Red Jackson, leader of the Midtowners, and his friends around in his car before he used his camera at all. The essay won him a staff job at the magazine, where he worked until 1972.

What it teaches: access comes before pictures. A week without shooting bought frames no one else could make.

Parks photographed the da Silva family in the Catacumba favela on a hillside in Rio de Janeiro, centering the essay on Flavio, the eldest of eight children, who had severe asthma and was not expected to live another year. Within a month readers had sent about $30,000, which moved the family out of the favela and paid for Flavio's treatment at a hospital in Denver.

What it teaches: one family can stand for a condition millions share, as long as readers never lose sight of the specific child.

A police reporter's case against New York's tenements. Riis used magnesium flash powder to photograph rooms too dark to record any other way.

What it teaches: a thematic essay can be an argument. Each picture is evidence for one claim.

It began as a 1936 Fortune assignment on sharecropping families in Alabama that the magazine never ran. In the book, Evans's pictures of three tenant families, their houses and their belongings appear as a portfolio, without captions, before Agee's long text begins.

What it teaches: words and pictures don't have to explain each other. Set apart, each does what it does best.

On a 1955 Guggenheim Fellowship, Frank drove across the country for about two years, shot roughly 28,000 frames and kept 83. There is no protagonist and no plot. Mood and recurring subjects hold it together: flags, cars, jukeboxes, people waiting. It is now counted among the most influential photobooks of the 20th century.

What it teaches: in a thematic essay the edit is the essay. It lives on a recurring motif and on juxtaposition, which picture sits next to which.

Portraits of wealthy and poor people in their homes, with each subject's handwritten comment on the print about their own life. The pictures show how people live. The handwriting shows how they see themselves, and the two don't always agree.

What it teaches: let subjects write. A caption in their own words is a second voice the photographer can't fake.

Stanton set out to photograph about 10,000 New Yorkers and plot them on a map. The project took off when he began adding what people told him, a short quote or story under each street portrait.

What it teaches: the format can be the theme. One portrait plus one quote, repeated, turned a census into a story.

Goldin's pictures of herself, her friends and her lovers in New York, made from 1979 on, were shown as a slideshow of more than 700 images set to music at the 1985 Whitney Biennial, then published as a book by Aperture.

What it teaches: a diary becomes a thematic essay when it keeps returning to one question, here intimacy and dependence. Pacing does the work captions do elsewhere.

The story in one sentence: after 41 years, Ray Delgado closes his shoe repair shop, and the essay follows his last Saturday from unlocking to the final turn of the key.

1. Wide: the storefront at 7:45 a.m., a hand-lettered closing notice in the window.
2. Portrait: Ray at his bench, apron on, looking at the camera.
3. Detail: his hands stitching a sole.
4. Interaction: a regular collecting boots she has brought here for 30 years.
5. Detail: the ticket drawer, still full of unclaimed pairs.
6. Action: Ray wrapping his tools in newspaper, one by one.
7. Interaction: his daughter taking the price list down from the wall.
8. Signature: Ray alone in the half-empty shop at 5 p.m., low light through the window.
9. Detail: the key in the lock.
10. Close: the dark window from across the street, one pair of shoes still on the shelf.

The idea in one sentence: people in a mid-sized city spend hours a week waiting, and the places built for it show how much their time is valued.

1. Statement: a bus shelter at 6 a.m., three strangers standing exactly apart.
2. Detail: a take-a-number ticket reading 87 while the screen shows 42.
3. Portrait: a woman reading in a laundromat, both her dryers turning.
4. Pair, side by side: airline lounge armchairs, then the bolted plastic chairs of a county benefits office.
5. Interaction: two strangers splitting a newspaper in a clinic waiting room, with permission.
6. Wide: the car line outside an elementary school at 2:55 p.m.
7. Turn: a child asleep across three waiting-room chairs, the only person not waiting.
8. Close: the same bus shelter at night, empty, the timetable lit.

3. Ray Delgado restitches a sole on Saturday, March 7, his last day of business on Fulton Street. He opened the shop in 1985 with a secondhand stitching machine he still uses.

8. Delgado stands in the emptied shop at 5 p.m. Thirty-one pairs were never collected. He donated them to a shelter two blocks away.