The Web site of photographer Michael Robinson Chavez -- note the lack of any navigation without having to scroll down.
Michael Robinson Chavez currently works for the Los Angeles Times, but I first became familiar with his work several years when he was a staff photographer for The Washington Post. He is probably best known for his international photojournalism and conflict coverage. Chavez was also awarded a POYi Award of Excellence for Newspaper Photographer of the Year in 2008.
His personal website is cleanly designed, with a very simple layout. The homepage contains a brief “news” section, and one image, which changes upon a refresh.
The Web site’s navigation scheme is organized rather unusually, at least for a newspaper photojournalist. It is set up for sections pertaining to geographic locations, rather than by categories describing the types of photos. The Web site is entirely built around stories and location-specific galleries — there are no single, standalone images, and no single “portfolio” section. This is obviously a personal choice, as Chavez has a large body of work from around the world to display, and he clearly wants to portray/market himself as a global documentarian, but I’d still like to be able to glance at a “best of” section. Lastly, other than a (very) brief overview of each story or gallery, there are no captions with any photos. I have a pretty big issue with this, as I’d really like to know what’s going on in some of these photos when it’s not really clear who’s shooting at who or why someone is crying, yelling, or bloodied. For a documentary photojournalist, it just seems kind of lazy to not have any context.
I like how each gallery can be viewed from a thumbnail perspective, or with large, individual images. However, it took a while to find “Next” and “Previous” buttons to navigate back and forth. Even on a 1440×900-pixel screen with a fully expanded window, I had to scroll down to navigate. This drawback could be solved by making individual pictures links that would direct backward and forward. Additionally, I don’t like the transition/wipe effect when flipping through photos; it takes too long and is distracting.
One final critique is that I wish the page titles visible in the URL address bar were actually informative and content-specific, rather than a jumbled mess of alphanumerics and punctuation. I realize this is usually a product of using a CMS as a backbone, but there are still ways to customize it, and steps should be taken to do so. A pet peeve? Probably, but I notice it nonetheless.