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In early 2015, Jeff Kelly Lowenstein, a freelance investigative journalist, published a story in The Chicago Reporter about a reverse mortgage scheme that targeted elderly African-Americans on Chicago’s south and west sides. More than 1,700 words, and accompanied by a trove of court documents, the article detailed the legal fight to protect homeowners.
Then Lowenstein and his brother, the photographer Jon Lowenstein, did something else: They posted a photo taken by Jon of Lillie Williams, one of the homeowners snared in the scam, on Jon’s Instagram feed, with a caption that distilled Williams’ plight and the broader story.
It’s just one example of how the Lowenstein brothers, who live in Chicago, have used Instagram to engage new audiences for investigative and accountability-minded reporting. Using Jon’s Instagram account, Jeff explains the story behind the pictures his brother makes, and they convene a rolling conversation in comments–answering questions and posing their own, soliciting similar stories and affirming them, sharing anecdotes and frustrations from the reporting process. “I hear you” is one of Jeff’s common refrains.
Since Instagram doesn’t allow hyperlinks in captions or comments, Jeff Kelly Lowenstein, 50, has to rely on what he writes under his brother’s images—and the subsequent back-and-forth with commenters—to sum up complicated stories like the reverse mortgage scheme or a data-heavy look at disparities in nursing home care that the Center for Public Integrity published in 2014. (When people ask, he’ll also point them to a URL where they can read more.) Jon Lowenstein, 46, a co-president of the Amsterdam-based photographer’s collective NOOR, documented the images for the nursing home story as well.
In a recent interview, Jon said he started using his iPhone as a way to share his work documenting life on the south side of Chicago. He liked how “instant” it was, he said, familiar and similar to the Polaroid film he favored, and how it gave “access to people very quickly to photography.” After a while, people started asking him if he was on Instagram. He decided to jump aboard in 2013.
The platform, he said, “became this space for true dialogue. Now I was able to build my own audience for it and share in a different way.” And that audience is significant–he has 154,00 followers on Instagram. (That’s larger than the Washington Post’s photo account).
It made sense, said Jeff, to try to reach that audience with stories that both brothers were passionate about telling.
“I saw how for a while he was really approaching his work like a beat,” Jeff said. “He was working the Instagram beat of the community of the south side, of immigration. I felt that there was a tremendous opportunity for people who might not get investigative data, resources, and findings and to dialogue with them through the captions and comments of Instagram. If we put this together people will not only look at the images, people will really engage with the material. There’s a hunger for this kind of material, for people making connections.”
The Lowenstein brothers are not the only ones using Instagram to tell long-form stories—or stories that go beyond an image. Other examples include Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Paul Salopek’s Out of Eden walk, the Every Day Climate Change project, and Virginia Quarterly Review’s social media experiment in non-fiction.
But one thing that makes the brother unique is that they are a team, a photographer and a writer, “like the old days when magazines understood that having a tight word-image duo who were in sync was a very strong asset,” said Nina Berman, a NOOR documentary photographer and associate professor at Columbia University.
Berman also applauded the dialogue the Lowensteins foster on Instagram. There, she said, “they make an effort to respond to each comment thoroughly, which is very special.” And those responses are often questions or invitations to further engage—something more journalists should emulate, Berman added.
Fernando Diaz is a senior editor at the Center for Investigative Reporting in California and former former managing editor of Spanish-language Hoy Chicago, which also published the nursing home investigation. The brothers’ Instagram collaboration, he said, “is an elegant and effective example of distributed publishing.”
“For so long, publishers have wanted or needed to draw audiences back to their website,” Diaz said. On Instagram, the Lowensteins show “what’s possible when you go to the where the community is literally and geographically by incorporating the people into the conversations alongside those photos.”
The brothers don’t only collaborate on big projects. They’ve also used Instagram on a smaller scale, with Jeff bringing data to discussions sparked by images Jon makes of Chicago’s violence.
And they have already started thinking about their next project, using Jon’s photographs and Jeff’s reporting to document what life is like 50 years after Martin Luther King Jr. visited the city.
“There have been some changes, but really a lot of the things King was talking about–housing and police violence–are still going on are still very alive and are not really contextualized that well on Instagram,” Jon Lowenstein said. The project fits with his interests as a documentary photographer, he said—interests emphasized by many of the recurring hashtags in his Instagram feed (#southside, #violence, #poverty, #immigration, #corruption).
It will be interesting to see what they come up with–and to watch whether more journalists follow their lead.
“Everyone we talk to in the investigative community sees the potential,” Jeff Kelly Lowenstein said. “I think that we are just in this very interesting moment where the audiences that individuals have are getting to the point where they are of value.”
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