Wall-flower with Camera
Make photos that meaningfully document the people you share your life with; just don’t be a pain about it: Part I
Part I
Why?
You have an interest in documentary photography; you have experience making photos with care and intention; you have people in your life who you enjoy being with, whose relationships you value, with whom you’ve shared meaningful experiences, with whom you have shared history.
Do you have photos of them?
Were they crafted with care?
Do they capture some aspect of these people or the shared moments or your shared relationships?
Do they suck?
Were you snapping photos just because you felt you should?
Do they really suck?
Are your friends and family posed, standing rigid in a line like posts, wearing unnatural smiles and expressions of barely masked impatience?
The ability to visually document human experience with ease — to record, store and reproduce images with high fidelity, to stop time, to filter out all of the world’s chaos and focus with astonishing acuity is…what?
Commonplace?
Old news?
Overshadowed by newer technology and media?
Are you kidding? No! Wrong! No, way!
Well, probably you’re right, but…but, please listen!
Photography is still miraculous; it’s magic. It’s everywhere; it’s been around for nearly two centuries but it’s still just so damn cool.
Great photography is magic just like good bread is magical and it’s magic just like deep-sea submersibles are magic. It can still surprise you; it can still let you see things that you wouldn’t see (or notice) otherwise. And can you think of anything more commonplace, anything less likely to pierce through the clutter and cacophony of daily life than freshly baked bread and deep-sea submersibles?
PIZZA!
What about pizza?
The magic of photography is easy to take for granted but so is pizza and pizza will always rock.
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Bad pizza and bad photos can result from poor quality ingredients, operator inexperience, technical ignorance or faulty equipment — all forgivable.
Unforgivable, though, is the bad pizza or the bad photo that comes from lack of intention, lack of attention and lack of love.
That’s right, love!
Making photos of loved ones without love and intention is like simultaneously flipping off the pioneers of photography and slapping your grandchildren across the face.
Making loveless photos in the present results in little more than undefined clutter and scraps of the past in the future. That said, making pizza devoid of love and intention should require an international tribunal and it’s own circle of hell.
Always make pizza with LOVE!
Unlike pizza, where it is commonly known that even bad pizza is better than no pizza, bad, or lazy, photos of people are not better than no photographs.
Lazy photography can mislead; bad pizza just makes you feel bloated.
Bad photographs mislead because they risk replacing our memories with a false narrative, a diluted, mechanical, emotionless narrative. Chronologically, geographically accurate — in focus and properly exposed but meaningless and misleading.
For example: the Muncie family takes a trip to San Diego
Your family — I don’t know, let’s call you the Muncies — have a long-awaited, well-earned vacation planned for sunny San Diego, California. Among the many activities planned, you’ve scheduled surfing lessons for your daughter.
Seems like an activity that might produce some good photo evidence for the archives.
Option 1:
Full length photo of daughter posed holding surfboard before her first lesson, clearly self-conscious, clearly impatient.
Or, Option 2:
A short series of photos — some closeup, some establishing — of daughter and other kids listening to surf instructor, absorbed, attentive, anxious, excited. Followed by a short series of her trying to surf a wave. Followed by a post lesson photo of her, soaking, exhausted but exhilarated. Followed by her chowing down on a plate of tacos.
Option one is easy but meaningless, the other takes effort but is something she will stumble across in later years and cherish and keep so that her kids will stumble across them and learn something about mom — that she is human like them. They will ask her who took the photos and they’ll learn something about you, among other things, that you cherished your daughter.
This is the first part of a small series of articles building on this subject of applying documentary photography techniques to the people who matter most to you. Later parts will discuss documentary technique, a bit of relevant photo technique, general equipment suggestions, and (probably to the point of irritation) efforts to undo stereotyped, rote thinking about the role and value of photographs and the photographer in order to add meaning to the photos we make.
See you in the next segment.
