My worry about having so many jobs jammed together is this: how can I keep my eye fresh, my stamina intact, and photograph the unique character of each college? The stamina appears to be no problem—yesterday was a 15 hour day and, although my feet were cramping up by the end of it, I seemed to hit my stride at about hour 12. The hardest is the beginning. I don’t know if I have it in me yet, I’m not grounded, and I have to go through some photographic flailing before I find my footing.
At Mt St Mary University we started the campus tour in a golf cart. Jackie, my guide, really likes tooling around the campus in it. The college is a cozy, pretty place set at the base of the Catoctin Mountains with uniform, grey stone buildings. After about ten minutes, I made her stop. If I was going to get any connection with this place, it had to start on foot. A major weather system was moving in, and each fleeting hour might be my last dry one. I felt under a little pressure to produce great campus photos, immediately.
The rain held off for the morning, which was good, as I didn’t feel I had anything until close to noon. It took that long to get my bearings, (I was a little shell-shocked from being on a different campus the day before, then driving five hours). I found about three spots that worked for me, so that during class changes I could get a pretty, populated campus feel.
There is a great temptation, and I succumb frequently enough, to fall back on solutions that I know will work. This is frequently the task of a commercial photographer. What is needed is not a unique work of art. I have my own way of organizing the frame and making an appealing photo. I take those, the client is satisfied, and I’ve gotten them out of my system.
It is when I am in struggle, when I find a situation of complexity that seems overwhelming, that then the good stuff starts to happen. It seems to happen after I’ve been on the ground for awhile, and I know where I am. I am ready to start finding the hard photos, the ones that require I be in the flow for them to congeal.
There was a play on that night, Bertolt Brecht’s Antigone. Before the play, when the actors are getting ready, I figured would be a promising environment. As I entered the dressing room I walked into a caphophonous wall of wildly varying energies. Clusters of kids were loudly talking, a couple was in an intense bonding moment in the middle of the room, others were alone, re-reading their lines, walled off in a bubble of solitude. There were photographs here, if I could attune myself to this pre-performance intensity.
When Robin called me an hour later, she said, "Where are you? You sound so excited and wound up." I told her what I had just been shooting. "Oh, you got connected."
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