Corky Scholl by Charlotte

After watching Corky's video and the article on him I realised that being a good journalist has a lot more to do with your personality than I previously realised. Telling a story is all through words or photography is all about understanding the subject and surroundings and how they interact. Corky shows us how his patience and easy-going, sweet nature allows the subject to trust him and subsequently tell their story without apprehension.
In his video I noticed just how important all the little sounds are like footsteps, water lapping, the sound of a ball hitting a backboard. These sounds gave the story character and made it 'real' for the viewer. The use of such distinct and diverse sounds allowed one more sense to be stimulated for the viewer. We weren't being told a story by an anonymous reporter, we were put into the story, 'feeling' all the aspects of it for ourselves.
I also think that when reporters don't speak but let the quotes from people in the story, tell the story, it allows us to see the story in a more honest light. I'm starting to think it's somewhat like chinese whispers - each person that the story goes through before it gets to us, is one more layer of perspective we have distinguish and eliminate in order to get a clear unbiased view of what is actually going on. Scholl eliminates the middle man allowing the story to tell itself and be interpreted freely by the viewer for what is significant and important as human beings and nothing else.
You can tell Scholl's passion of life in his stories as he magnifies the human quality in people, their emotions, which also makes it easier to relate to and far more compelling. He focusses on the little things that make people human, their heavy breathing, a sly smile, the things that give people depth and character, instead of seeing people as just objects. When we dehumanize people, as so often happens in newstories, it allows us to skip the true consequences or miss the true beauty and spirituality of a scene. We don't process the story on a deep level, as human to human, we can hide from it's reality, consciously or unconsciously.