NOMAD Photos is a Canadian photo agency cooperatively owned by four documentary photojournalists. They pursue a stated goal of highlighting “under-reported social, political, health and environmental issues worldwide.” NOMAD markets its work to a variety of clients in the arts, media and not-for-profit/non-governmental sectors. I picked their multimedia site to look at because that kind of sounds like my dream job.
Built in xhtml using CSS, the bare bones site is organized by way of a simple frame structure using a stark color scheme of black and grey.
The three stories featured on the homepage lead the visitor to a new page where they can access a commercial gallery/slideshow presentation supported by PhotoShelter.
Within the NOMAD site itself, the viewer can link to a ‘features’ page that showcases a selection of each photographers’ work. Clicking on each photographers’ name leads to another page where you can click on a thumbnail representing a photo project which leads to another page with a slideshow. The whole process is a little onerous and involves a lot of clicking around to find everything. I was also disappointed with the amount of information available about each story and the caption format was not consistent between photographers.
The NOMAD site’s ‘multimedia’ page features seven very small Quicktime MOV files. Most of these are clearly produced to advance the interests of specific NGOs in Afghanistan rather than to function as journalistic reports. They feature music soundtracks and odd little video flourishes (like page turning or spinning cube effects) that make them feel a little tacky. One of the videos is about an AIDS patient, which feels a little abruptly out of place.
All in all, the sites efforts to target any specific audience feels a little haphazard. I think it would help if there were more consistency in the presentation of each photographers work. I also get the sense that the site isn’t updated very regularly, especially since the copyright at the bottom of the page only goes through 2008.
