Feeding My Passion

I hadn’t heard of Anne Lamott until Kim Komenich assigned Bird by Bird when I first took the class. As incredibly readable and entertaining as the book is, I don’t think I got through it then. This time I did finish it and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I’m very glad it’s on the reading list.

Lamott’s advice is meant for writers, but it’s applicable to anyone who creates things and has to do it alone. Of course, for this class, we’re supposed to frame Lamott’s advice for us as photojournalists, specifically photojournalists who are supposed to spend time with real people who we photograph, then put multiple pictures together in order to tell a story, or to present a viewpoint.

In my opinion, she spends the first part of the book working on your inertia, getting started, on doing. And she does it in a very helpful and highly entertaining way that is great at assisting us get past the first, most important, and completely unavoidable wall: Getting started.

The first technique, or approach she talks about is to write down (or photograph in our case), all that we can see through a one-inch picture frame. I don’t think she uses the word “vignette,” but I that’s what she’s saying, but maybe a vignette of a vignette. So our first assignment dovetails very nicely with that concept, short strokes, small slice. By reducing the scope and the scale in the beginning, we’ll most likely reduce our anxiety about tackling something bigger as well, and learn to string ideas, words, and paragraphs (and photographs) together in interesting and meaningful ways. Getting ideas and photos in the can will also help to build confidence. Avoid any self or external critique at this point. To bastardize Nike’s phrase, “Just do a little of it.” It does help, it is less intimidating, especially for me, who hasn’t taken photographs as a non-amateur for quite a while, to just take small bites rather than trying to dig into the entire roast as an appetizer. (So many metaphors!) It’s the culinary equivalent of an amuse bouche.

Well not exactly quite that polished. Maybe it’s more like an amuse bouche cattle call. Which leads us to her second bit of advice, not worrying or judging the quality of even the sense of your first efforts, just writing, in her words, “shitty first drafts.” Again great advice, even more for photographers when coupled with the one-inch picture frame approach because it allows you to warm up on low-stake subjects in low-risk situations, and just start working without any regard to quality or consequences.

But for me, this is where the parallels between writing and photojournalism aren’t so true. The worst writers can do is waste their own time, ink, and paper. Not so with photojournalists, who mainly photograph people, and unless the subject is completely unselfconscious, and the photographer completely invisible, our presence is often unnatural and sometimes an intrusion. And our subject are rarely alone the entire time we photograph them, so we’re a part of any interaction they have, and it’s likely others will be less comfortable around us than our subjects, just because they’ve had less time to get used to us. When taking photos of people, I tend to be a self-conscious photographer, and the subject can probably sense that, and it can make them more uncomfortable than they naturally would be. Definitely something I need to stay aware of, because I think as I relax, they’ll also relax. Loup’s book will probably talk about the specific challenge of being somewhere, in somebody’s life, when it really isn’t necessary, especially as a student who’s not working for a publication. And I’ll probably like to talk with you about it as well.

Avoiding perfectionism is also part of Lamott’s good advice. This is where I think photojournalists have an advantage over writers or other creators that seem to have every opportunity and technique available to make things just right. We have to take things as they are, at least in the documentary tradition where you don’t pose or alter what’s going on any more than being there with a camera does. Of course we have technical things to learn to best tell our stories and illustrate or viewpoints: lighting, both natural and artificial; film speed (what do you call it now with digital, just ISO, sensitivity?); focal length; depth of field; and position. We must working toward mastery of the technical aspects of the craft in order to make great photographs, but we have relatively limited set of things we can control compared to other creative endeavors, and to me, that’s not a bad thing at all. I really like the Cartier-Bresson quote about thinking that you include in the syllabus sidebar. Perfectionism feels to me like thinking during the process instead of watching and listening.

She likens the process of creating to a Polaroid developing, slowly, the subjects and details coming to the surface and into focus, not truly knowing what it will look like until it is fully developed. It reminds me of an interesting quote by Michelangelo about sculpture: “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” And “The best of artists has no conception that the marble alone does not contain within itself.” I like this concept very much, especially since, for reasons of time or willfulness, I’ve gone into a situation to take photos with a preconceived idea of what I want to get or what I will get. This is dangerous, and that’s not hyperbole, because I think the worst thing you can do to your subjects is lie about them. That’s what can very easily happen if you make photos that fit your idea of the story when it goes against the story that’s actually there. When you pound that square peg into a round hole, you’re damaging yourself as well, even if your photographs never make it to a publication.

To prevent this injustice, I think you need to spend time listening and watching, educating yourself apart from your subjects and most importantly, with them. Your ideas cannot be more sacred than what’s happening. A skilled photographer can capture untrue things as well as true things, kind of an in-camera manipulation, that is confusing at best and at worst, harmful to the subject’s image and the photographer’s sense of their own purpose.

She goes on to talk about character, which for writers, is most efficiently revealed through dialog. And when you’re creating fictional characters, you can only hear this dialog by listening, not by putting words into their mouths. Of course, since you are creating these characters and writing this dialog yourself, out of nearly thin air, that seems like an odd thing to say, you are putting words in their mouth. But for Lamott, really you’re writing down words they’re speaking, you’re listening carefully, and dictating. Her chapter on dialog is similar to this one, lots of listening, and for us, watching and making pictures which accurately and hopefully pleasingly, portray what’s going on.

We can’t take pictures of what people are saying, so we must photograph their actions, or more broadly, their physical bodies and spaces. Sitting around doing nothing isn’t much of an action, but photographing someone sitting around doing nothing isn’t an illegitimate photo. We must listen to them and watch them, there is no substitute for it if we’re to document something. Unless we do, we can’t know them. And we can’t tell whatever facet of their story we want to tell unless we know them. It’s not really our story, we’re just the story-tellers, so we have to be there and get the story, or else we’re just making stuff up or leaving holes.

Plot is also something we tend to impose, but should ideally be something very similar to the Polaroid analogy, something that reveals itself over time as we spend time with the subject. She says to let plot happen as a natural product of getting to know them, that we shouldn’t force it. Everything I said about the Polaroid analogy applies here. I think plot for photojournalists can also have a lot to do with the edit and layout design, since we don’t move around words, we can change the plot of a photo story by picking different photos to take the story in another direction, or even emphasizing one photo over another with reproduction size or placement. None of this necessarily means you’re misrepresenting the truth, it just means you’re telling different parts of their story. A musician can emphasize certain notes over others in a phrase and change the rhythm, tone, and feeling. It just depends on what’s there and what we’re trying to say about it.

Set design, even more than dialog, is something we can’t fake as documentary photographers. We do try to pick subjects that make good visual stories, so we pick our sets, but we can’t manipulate them like other creative people can, we deal the best we can with what we’ve picked. There can certainly be space issues that our lens choice can mitigate or background clutter and lighting challenges to work around or we can use them, incorporating those things into the story.

She also talks about researching your subject’s environment and roles, which is always a good idea so you don’t miss things you otherwise would out of ignorance of what’s going on when you see it. You may not photograph something because you’re not aware of how important a particular event is until it’s too late. And we’re supposed to be helping explain the subject to the viewer, and the more we can do to facilitate that education, the better. The amount of research you do will ideally be in inverse proportion to how well you know that environment or those roles. Lamott does book-based research, but also uses people who have some or a lot of experience as sources. I think as photographers, we don’t use people outside our story as sources so much since we’re already working with people in the story, but this is a legitimate way to do research, even for us. I think it’s a wonderful compliment to have someone who been through the same things your subject has to tell you that you’ve really captured what it’s like, that you really understand them or the issue. You can get to this point even if you can’t completely empathize with them, but I think some sort of research is critical in that case.

Ugh, false starts. I’ve certainly started photo stories in the past, full of hope and ideas, thinking that the subject will be a very interesting person and the story will be full of great visuals. Well, I hadn’t really done my research, or spent much time with the person before I started investing real time and film (how quaint!), and the story didn’t work out. Or I gave up because I wasn’t mature and sensitive enough to alter my idea of the story when the visuals weren’t matching my mental pictures. Sometimes I did stay with the subject long enough and was able to open my mind to one of the stories that was really there, instead of one of the many that wasn’t. Then I had to start really listening, really seeing, and then photographing differently.

Like stereotyping, imposing our ideas is an easier and quicker way of dealing with the world, sorting people into nice categories, but it points to a lack of humanity on our part and takes away from theirs in the process. With all the Buddhist philosophy currently floating around, it seems like a cliché to say that we need to be very mindful and aware, but it’s true. If we do, we’ll more easily divine the most important stories our subjects have to tell instead of the ones we think they should be able to tell.

Plot treatments sound a lot like story pitches, from the simple, like having an idea for a  feature picture, to the much more involved and torturous process of pitching your story idea to the faculty at the Missouri Photo Workshop. It certainly helps if you can see what the potential visual story really is, and then communicate it very clearly, especially since you don’t have the photos yet to explain what you’re seeing. Of course, as you photograph the story, there will be unexpected events, challenges, and plot twists. That’s pretty natural, but as the saying goes, luck favors the prepared, and if you’re mindful and aware, you’ll probably handle them, making them a part of the story you’re trying to tell.

So when are you done documenting? Just before the deadline of course! Haha, just kidding. A little. Like working for a publication, this class does have deadlines, and just on a purely practical level, you have to wrap up photographing the story in time to get an edit together and do whatever writing you need to do. Sometimes the story itself has a well-defined arc and clearly terminates at a point. This is a story after all: Begining, middle, and end, right? Essays are different. Ideas or viewpoints generally have fewer distinct points along the arc, maybe no arc at all. However they do have facets, and you can probably stop making pictures if you feel like you have all the facets of the viewpoint you’re trying to express. And then you must put your images together into a group, an honest, cohesive, visually interesting and diverse group.