For many, the meaning of spring is in the air -- sweet smells of blossoms, the brillant yellow of the daffodil popping out through browned earth, the songs of black birds around the marsh. For others, especially photographers, spring is in the light. As the sun's arc rises in the sky, the world appears in sharper contrasts to the dull grays of winter.
This week, I started a project at the United Bike Institute, which is only one of a few schools in the United States that train bicycle mechanics. People from around the world come to the school for classes that cover a wide range of topics, from making frames to fixing flats.
Getting back behind the camera in a serious way after nearly a decade-long break to finish my education has made me more aware of the ways in which I see. Obviously, my studies in visual behavior and photography have transformed the way I think about pictures. However, the actual process of making images pretty much stays the same.
What I am more aware of these days are the relationships I have with the things I see. There is a sense of purpose to seeing that I feel much more connected to now then in the past. In some ways, news work took the joy out of the experience of observing. Making pictures back in the day, capturing the decisive moment, seemed more about commodification and categorization than it did about experiencing and encountering life through making sense of the things I see.
Seeing to make pictures takes patience, something that is rarely learned in school. Patience is a gift, just like anticpating moments, and the ability to read light well.
The truth is that anyone can make a photograph, but to make a picture that is meaningful to many is a different very sort of animal.
When you are working for someone else there are always implicit and explicit expectations to attend to beyond just making technically clean and compositonally appealing frames. There is always a bit of a guessing game going on between photographer and the user of the pictures that one hopes for the best with.
As I return over and over again to the scene of what I am observing, I become more aware of my surrounding and to the sights and sounds in front of me. To just go into a situation with the motordrive cranking out pictures is a big mistake.
Inside my head I try to think about what photographers such as William Klein, Gary Winogrand, Elliot Erwitt, or Mary Ellen Mark might see in a similar situation. It's not that I try to copy their styles, but I do try to think about them standing in the same light as I am. I think about these photographers trying to solve problems with pictures and with light -- I think about how they tell stories with their cameras. Then, I try to solve the problem of tell a story in my own unique way. The hope is that if I like the way I make pictures, others will too.
I think one of the biggest problems today with digital technology is that has become too easy of a medium. Photography, in a digital format, tends to subordinate process by providing the false illusion that what you see is more than what you will get.
To fill up a 2 gigabyte memory card with images that may or may not be meaningful to others is a form of gaming the moment -- anyone can do it.
Digital technology gives us a false sense that just because we can see the picture immediately after capture doesn't mean we have something meaningful to look at.
In my work I use just one 512 mb card at a time. I use a smaller memory card because I want to force the picture-making process to slow down more. After a card is full, I stop and download the pictures to my laptop without looking at them, and start again.
Although this may seem counter intutitive, because of the risk of "missing a moment," most of what we see in life will happen again. Life is cyclical and rich with patterned reoccurances. I don't mind missing the so-called "moment" because for me, life is all about moments -- one after another.
What I am looking for, then, are the moments that are universally meaningful to the people I am making picture of -- signs of joy or despair, frustration or exhaltation.
Of course, this method would not work for a lot of folks on deadline, but for a photographer engaged in more ethnographic forms of documentary photojournalism, the idea of slowing down a bit makes sense.
And now it is spring, when life renews itself with hope and promise. It's a time when the sun rises higher and stays a little longer in the sky -- a time to make pictures.