Extra Credit | Ed Kashi | Robinson

Ed Kashi is a phenomenal photographer. He whipped his photos across the screen in the blink of an eye, yet each image managed to penetrate the viewer's sense of humanity. It was a pleasure to see his work.

Kashi displayed most of his work in multimedia form. All of his projects were condensed into a video or Soundslides format. He said that audio and video are invaluable supplements, not substitutes, for photographs because they can convey the subject's emotions more. In between photographs, there would be a statistic about the demographic he was shooting, or a bit of context.

This string of words, images and video created a seamless narrative. Kashi called himself, "a video storyteller."

I was very impressed with his range of skills. But later he revealed that he does very little of the post-production work, including refining his photographs and creating the short documentaries. His staff does that. Then I was disappointed. I think that in this day in age, it's important to have a versatile skill set. It would be extremely helpful and perhaps more cost-efficient, if he learned to use FinalCut Pro and Photoshop.

Kashi insisted he was too busy to work post-production. He used an analogy (which I'm totally going to paraphrase), saying, I'm the coal miner. Not the coal polisher or diamond salesman. My job is to get the nuggets and bring them back.