5. Case History

2.

Gilles had not worked on the Web before - for him the film and the book were the most productive structural metaphors as starting places. After looking at and discussing the month-and-a-half worth of photographs that Gilles had taken in and around Sarajevo as Muslims were moving back into their own neighborhoods and Serbs were moving away, responding to well-intentioned United Nations directives and to sinister rumors of potential genocide that were floating about, we decided upon the metaphor of the journalist as the operative strategy for the reader. The reader would be required to click on images, unaware of what was next, comparing information, taking trips and side trips through photographs, text, sound and video, removing themselves from the journalistic representations to go to one of 14 forums to participate in discussions of the events (introduced by UN Ambassador Madeline Albright, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour and human rights activist Aryeh Neier, among others), or to look at maps and other archival material provided by the Times and National Public Radio.

The navigational devices for each screen, in these early days of the Web, were discussed for weeks as we aimed for simplicity, short download times, and the ability to explore aspects of the narrative with greater complexity (we had a “More” button). Two screens of small photographs were provided to function as “contact sheets” allowing the reader to go to any part of the reportage without following the various pathways that we had set up.

The photography was discussed and reevaluated in Web terms - we could give 360-degree looks at things, we could use complex images to serve as multiple links, we could scroll sideways or up and down, we could create collages, etc. We decided to accompany Gilles’s photographs with his own written text and his voice expressing more of his emotional reactions and philosophical questions. We were also in contact with numerous people in Bosnia, the UN and elsewhere trying to find other ways of telling the story - dispatches (from stringer Kit Roane), post cards, historical pictures (provided by Times editor Mark Bussell), maps, etc.