told.’ But I didn’t take the picture. And then two days later I was sleeping on that woman’s couch.”

Only 28 years old, Crow has already garnered an Emmy nomination, the 2009 Ian Parry Scholarship for young photographers, and a spot in World Press Photo’s prestigious Joop Swart Masterclass. Her early success is no doubt due in part to the lesson she learned in that West Virginia diner: The trust of your subject is more valuable than any photo.

Work as CollaborationFor Crow, it has always been forming relationships with her subjects that has drawn her to photog-raphy. Raised in Corpus Christi, Texas, she didn’t

Above: The subject of Maisie Crow’s series “Love Me” seeks comfort from her father.

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Maisie Crow documents lives through photography, multimedia and the vantage point of friendship By miki johnson

Empathetic Eyeone To WATCh

The peopLe behind The piCs undEr covEr 12 work in progrEss 22 show placEs 24

hen 25 coal miners were killed in an underground explosion in Montcoal, West Virginia, last April, Maisie Crow traveled

there from Ohio, where she was living at the time, to make photographs. As the community waited to hear the fate of another four miners, Crow be-friended the owners of a coffee shop in the tiny Appalachian town. She was hanging out at that coffee shop when a customer learned that her brother had died in the mine.

“The woman who owned the restaurant turned to me and another photographer and said, ‘Put your cameras down,’” Crow recounts. “It was so hard. I thought, ‘This is a story that needs to be

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start making photos until her senior year at the University of Texas at Austin. One of her first photo assignments, from renowned photographer and professor Eli Reed, helped guarantee she’d never put her camera back down.

Crow photographed an 18-year-old boy she’d met at a transitional shelter for immigrants. “I was so amazed he would let me just follow him around,” she says. “That was my first ‘wow’ moment—I would never have been able to hang out with him if I didn’t have my camera.”

Another such moment came a few years ago when Crow was working on a multimedia piece called “Hungry,” about a young man named Max with Prader-Willi Syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes behavioral and physical problems in-cluding insatiable hunger. The story focuses on the relationship between Max and his father, Lon, and how they deal with his illness.

But equally important to Crow—and to the impact of the piece—was the bond she formed with Max and Lon. In a post on the blog Visual Journal-ist, Crow talks about filming a tantrum Max had after his school aide was changed. “I viewed them as friends as much as subjects,” Crow says. “I felt helpless and wanted to do more than film what was happening, but I realized that my purpose as a journalist was to document their lives in order to share their story with others.”

Whereas some documentary photographers struggle with a perceived need to be objective— to tell people’s stories without getting emotionally involved—Crow says she has a hard time telling someone’s story if she isn’t “rooting for them.” That’s why she often treats her work as a collabo-ration with the person she’s photographing.

This means integrating subjects’ voices, fam-ily photos and handwritten notes into her multi-

media photofilms, which combine still photos, audio interviews, video and scanned artifacts. But to her, collaboration is also something intangible, a mutual respect for how vulnerable a person may feel in front of the camera—or behind it.

An example of this can be seen in a story she tells about Tom Rose, the subject of her piece “A Life Alone,” nominated last year for an Emmy in new Approaches to news & Documentary Pro-gramming. The two met in line at a locksmith’s store, and Crow asked to take his portrait. Upon arriving at his home, she found out that he had been crushed by his wife’s recent death. Yet Rose was the one feeling bad for Crow—a young girl in the cold with no warm coat. “He looked at me as if I was this

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vulnerable person .. . and I was looking at him the same way,” she says. “I realized that the minute I stop being vulnerable to the people I photograph is the minute I won’t be able to tell stories anymore.”

Films and stillsCrow, now freelancing in new York City, has a talent for telling stories through photofilms. It’s a skill she honed as an intern at the groundbreaking multimedia production studio MediaStorm follow-ing her first year of graduate studies in visual com-munication at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. Yet she believes some stories are better told through still images—such as her “Love Me” project, docu-menting the life of a young woman, “Autumn” (not

her real name), living in southeastern Ohio as she struggles toward adulthood in a world of poverty.

Because Crow’s approach to this story has been to “shoot it really hard for a year” and then leave it alone for a few months before going back, she is concentrating on still images, which she hopes to make into a book. “Multimedia can be a valuable tool, but it doesn’t feel right for something where I’m jumping in and out at different points,” she says.

Completing a multimedia piece on a subject may also prematurely put a bookend on the story, Crow adds. And sometimes a photo series is just a beginning. “There are three or four people who I’m so intrigued with, by their will to persevere,” Crow says. “I think I’ll follow those people forever.” AP

Above: in “Love Me,” Autumn gets an earful from her younger brother during an argument over the chair she is sitting in. Left: Autumn with her boyfriend.

CLose-Up

Maisie CrowLives In New York CityStudied At University of Texas at Austin; Ohio University, AthensAwards Ian Parry Scholarship; World Press Photo’s Joop Swart Masterclass; Emmy nomination, New Approaches to News & Documentary ProgrammingWork Experience MediaStorm, The Boston Globe, Save the ChildrenInfluences Eugene Richards’s Dorchester Days and Explod-ing into Life and Richard Billingham’s Ray’s a Laugh, among others. “I try to look at one new piece of work a day,” Crow says.

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