This is from the third in a series of images I have been making this year on workspaces. I am fascinated with how people use space and how they adapt to specialized environments. This workspace belongs to San Jose State University photographer Bob Bain--it's his universe where a lot of things happen. It seems like every available space has something on it or in it.
APAD's online gallery is a showcase for photojournalists
I have been meaning to mention a website that is a wonderful resource for aspiring photojournalists. Aphotoaday is more than a blog, listserve, website or anything e-info. Apad is a community and is a wonderful example of the power of the Internet.
According to Melissa Lyttle, aphotoaday founder, "Our goal at aphotoaday is to foster the advancement of photojournalism. Aphotoaday is dedicated to building a photo community that promotes individuality, encourages ideas and nurtures the talent of today's hottest young photographers." Apad is a community of more than 600 professional and student photojournalists "in 30 states and around the world."
Every year at about this time, students begin to get a little anxious.
Why?
It's not final exams or final projects.
It's not the Spring Thing or even graduation.
It's Eddie Adams time.
Barnstorm XVII 2004
The Eddie Adams Photojournalism Workshop has made such a huge difference in the lives of so many young photojournalists. Now, photojournalism is so much the better for it. Although Eddie is no longer with us, we can still say "Thank you Eddie" for the dreams, vision and inspiration to generations of photojournalists. This workshop is Eddie's legacy and worth every effort to try and participate in.
Melissa Lyttle of APAD offers some terrific advice on the workshop and even gets some help from friends to explain the importance and history of the event. If you are planning on entering this year, make sure you read every word of advice Melissa and company offers before finishing your portfolio.
Here's an excerpt:
The way it works: Portfolios are sent in, and go out to one of about 30 photo editors for initial critiques. They are ranked and sent back, and the top 75-85% go on to the final review. The Final Review is an all-day event, where between 20 and 40 editors, Barnstorm Faculty, and Board of Directors members come and sit through a slide show of each student's work. Each of these people votes In or Out for each student, and at the end of the day, the votes are tallied, and the top 50 students and 50 professionals are invited to attend Barnstorm.
Melissa's own advice:
Edit tightly.
Show only what you love. different is good.
It’s better if you don’t fill the “newspaper formula.”
Personal vision is encouraged.
Your letter of recommendation counts a lot....as does your potential.
I couldn't agree more. Good luck!
I love how shadows can tell a part of a story I would normally overlook. I did a little desaturation on the image and just left the shoes and a bit of jeans in color. It's fun to play with PhotoShop, but disclosure of the process is also really important. I find the effect powerful and playful.
This morning I have been reflecting on how photographers create a sense of place in their imagery. I am inclined to believe that so much of the meanings we attach to the things we see and photograph are far less connected to the denotative and objective but entirely bound to personal subjectivities, idealizations and myths we hold about the world and our experience in it.
Last Decemeber I wrote about memory and the image:
Memory is the desire to possess and reconstruct some part of a life from scraps of how things used to be. Memory is tricky -- all weighty illusions of things recalled and recognized.
This is the weight of images in our world -- mental images, dreams, and mediated messages -- all part of our consciousness and unconsciousness. As Hanno Hardt, suggests "....facing a photograph becomes a confrontation with past experiences, it challenges the imagination to think beyond the surface qualities of the image."
Ernst Cassierer argues in Language and Myth how reality becomes reduced to a kind of fiction because using language to describe and explain something always to seem to fall short of the original. Albeit a very loose reading of Cassierer ideas, this is realm we are working in with photography -- a realm of imagination, recall, recollection, memory, emotion, and symbolism.
At the same time, according to Cassierer, "All symbolism harbors the curse of mediacy; it is bound to obscure what it seeks to reveal." Within a context of sense of place, the photographer's ability to transcend the mundane through the aesthethics of the frame is connected to our desire to be less Xerox machine and more reflective of the environments we experience.
One of the major challenges in working on long-form visual narratives is in organizing ourselves around the process as it unfolds over the weeks and months.
Photo by Tomomi Tsuda
In our class we start out with directing our attention toward photographing and editing for a sense of place in the imagery. There is an implicit rhetorical power to the images we look for in our work that makes the story more persuasive and compelling. The idea is similar to how a writer begins a novel with a sentence that will make the reader want to read on. In many great books, it is the first sentence that grabs your attention and makes you curious about what will come next. The same is true in long-form visual editing.
The objective is not to come up with a formula for producing narratives. Rather, the purpose of breaking down the structure of the narrative into parts is to build continuity throughout story. First and foremost, we begin our exploration of the social documentary with an appreciation for the meaning of relationships between people, places, things, and ourselves.
Sense of Place
The first images we edit for must provide a sense of place that are the equivalents of the so-called scene setters or establishing shots we have become so familiar with in Hollywood movies. Sense of place images ultimately provide the mood and tone for the project. Levels of Ambiguity: At the same times, sense of place images may also have varying degrees of ambiguity to them. People tolerate ambiguities differently.
Ultimately, we begin we a sense of place because it makes us ask a few important questions.
For example, does your selection of images compel the viewer to enter the story more closely? Is the message you are trying to communicate to the viewer clear?
Good documentary photographers know how to use light to create mood and express the meaning of relationships that emerge in the story.
Sense of Time
The purpose of thinking about visuals in terms of a sense of time is to bring the viewer into the narrative through images that generate a logical sequence of events and themes. The images we look for in terms of sense of time are generally part of the body of middle of the story. In literature, this would be where the narrative rises, reaches a climax, and falls. For example, action and informational images help to establish a narrative arc by showing how the images represent a theme or subject over a period of time.
In addition, a sense of time can also be shown through details. These are close-up images that act as transitional elements in the story and provide deeper levels of insight and information.
Levels of Ambiguity:
Are the images organized thematically or chronologically or both? How does the story flow from one image to the next?
Providing a sense of time through visual storytelling is the photojournalists bread and butter of documentary work. For me, there is always a tendency to get stuck shooting and reshooting the middle of the story rather than on concentrate on patterns, themes and the greater purpose of the documentary.
Sense of Closure
Finally, people need closure to have a story make sense to them. In other words, your images need to suggest some resolution and ending. Editing for sense of closure pictures means that we are considering the needs of the audience in having a feeling of reconciliation to the story.
Levels of Ambiguity:
How do you expect the viewer to feel after seeing your story?
Photograph copyright by Matt Black
Photography has become deeply embedded in our cultural fabric as a formative and persuasive way of knowing the world around us. In school, we are taught to embrace written language as the traditional method for communicating or expressing knowledge and experience. However, prior to this system people relied upon oral traditions for sharing culture and shaping social knowledge. This oral tradition relied on visual metaphor as a representative system of expression.
Human beings communicate through metaphor, which can be generally defined as a figure of speech , That is, how something is conceived of figuratively rather than as a literal representation. In other words, a metaphor is n expression that refers to something that it does not literally signify. An example might be when I talk about New York City as the “Big Apple” to describe its importance and stature in the world. Metaphors invite comparisons between things often through the use of symbols to express a thought, concept, idea, point of view in a figurative way.
According to Robert St. Clair (2000), “Metaphors are really statements based on some kind of analogy where two things are compared to each other.” Metaphors can be either textual or visual. For St. Clair, a “Visual metaphor is a term that designates how visual space is organized as a means of sharing cultural and social knowledge.”
The photograph can not only be a literal re-presentation of the things we see but can transcend time and space through metaphor. As Bates Lowry suggests, “We begin to see only when we act for ourselves. For what we actually do in learning how to see is to build up our experience with visual forms – experience made up of continually renewed contacts with the numerous objects around us.”
Learning to see is about envisioning space and interpreting our experiences in both denotative (literal) and connotative (figurative) ways. When students begin to understand and use symbols in their images to connote a frame of mind, mood, feeling, or emotion, then, they are beginning to make photographs that connect with more universally shared cultural and social meanings.
Photo copyright by Matt Black
Matt Black’s photography is a wonderful example of using visual metaphors as a way of knowing and envisioning culture and space.
For me, Matt’s work reveals one of the keys to meaningful documentary photography – relationships.
Relationship appears to come out of the relationships a photographer develops with the people, places and communities. I would suggest, however, that relationships are not just between people. A photographer must have a relationship with light, the camera, the environment, the culture, and the style or technique in which images are made.
A photographer must also have a relationship with the space in which they photograph. Further, a photographer must have a relationship with the institutions that provide access to events and people as well as those that eventually may publish the work.
Photo by Matt Black
I interviewed Matt recently through email to get a better sense of how he conceives of relationships and other issues in documentary photography. Here is Matt's bio from his website:
Matt Black grew up in rural California and has photographed the region extensively. This work has been honored by grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Alexia Foundation for World Peace, the California Arts Council, and the California Council for the Humanities. Portions of this work have been published in the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, West Magazine of the San Jose Mercury News, and others.
He earned a BA in Latin American and US History from San Francisco State University in 1994. He has photographed in Mexico, Guatemala and Bolivia, work that has received awards from the World Press Photo Foundation and the National Press Photographers Association. His work has also been honored by the Sunday Magazine Editors Association, Communication Arts, and has been published in The New York Times, Newsweek, The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, Stern, and others. He lives in Lemon Cove, a small community in central California.
The Interview:
DD:
How important are relationships for you when you make images? How can relationships be defined? Why are relationships important?
MB:
Well, if you want a sense of intimacy in your photographs it's very important to have good relationships with the people you are photographing. But, like you said, the word relationship can apply to many things. In my case, I've done a lot of work in one particular place, rural California, so in some ways it's a reflection of my relationship to the place. Also, like you said, the word implies a certain depth, or connections in your work.
The only thing I would add is that I don't think it's always necessary to completely understand what you are photographing and why you are drawn to it. Personally, I want to maintain a sense of discovery, of searching, The only important thing, I think, is that your subject moves you emotionally in some way, and that you think it is important to photograph it. You'll have plenty of time to figure out why later on.
DD:
How do you define community and culture?
MB:
I recently went to Mexico, to a very remote village. I've been to Mexico several times, but this village was exceptional. They told me that I was one of the few non-Mexicans ever to come. I stayed for about two weeks and saw a kind of village life that is very rare now. Of course we don't have it in America. Here, a "community" is something you join out of choice and when you get tired of it, you leave. In most parts of the world you don't have that luxury; you're born into your community and, more than likely, you'll never be able to leave it.
DD:
Where do you turn for inspiration and story ideas?
MB:
I find inspiration in many things. It is a basic pleasure to look at something that is well done, something that has been accomplished with a sense of purpose. You hope that your own work can rise to those standards. As far as story ideas, I don't really pursue them directly like that. Usually the things I work on are an outgrowth of previous work.
I find that one thing just leads to the next. For instance, I did a story about mass unemployment among farm workers following a freeze, and I discovered that many of the people I was photographing were indigenous Mexicans who spoke very little Spanish. That's the story I'm working on right now. If you pursue your work like that, someday you'll look back and find that it's shaping into certain themes.
That certainly has been my experience. Pretty soon these themes become part of your life and how you view the world. Once you have that, everything you see is through the prism of your work, and everything begins to have potential.
DD:
What do photojournalism students need to know to pursue a career with a camera?
MB:
That photography is difficult, that it simply can't be done well half-way, and that it can take a toll on other parts of your life. That might sound pretty tough, but I think it would be irresponsible not to prepare them for that. That being said, it can be a very emotionally rich way of interfacing with the world. Not all good emotions, mind you, but you can experience life with an immediacy that few people have.
DD:
How do you feel about the mainstream media's coverage of events impacting our lives?
MB:
Not so good, I mean, America has finally woken up to the fact that there is a world beyond our borders, and that's good, but the way it is being portrayed seems to be the same old cartoons -- stick figures dancing across the screen. Most of my work is right here in America. And I think that it is important to tell stories that remind people that there are many different Americas. In rural California, I've crossed many borders, all within a few hundred miles. I like to work on things that contradict most people's idea of America.
DD:
Are there any disappointment about photography you would like to share?
MB:
Of course I have disappointments. Anyone who does photography for any length of time is going to encounter many. You always feel like your work is not used as well as it should be. It's tough to be satisfied, but sometimes you need to hold a tiny bit of yourself back. Each photo builds upon the previous one, and each story builds upon the one before. When you have a disappointment, you need to try to remember that, and be patient.
Sources:
Robert N. St. Clair (2000). “Visual Metaphor, Cultural Knowledge, and the New Rhetoric” in Learn in Beauty: Indigenous Education for a New Century. Eds. Jon Reyhner, Joseph Martin, Louise Lockard, and W. Sakiestewa Gilbert. Flagstaff, AZ: Northern Arizona University.
Bates Lowry (1964). The Visual Experience: An Introduction to Art. NY: Prentice-Hall.
Dennis Dunleavy (2005). Interview with Matt Black. The Big Picture? Photography