In Sam Abell's new book, “The Life of a Photograph,” (which I'll be reviewing shortly), he tells a story of photographing an Indian rodeo, and being swamped by the energy of the event. “Late in the day I realized the rodeo was taking my photographs, not the other way around. Before it was too late I settled myself on a layered composition of sharp horizontal bands with an interior frame and let the action come to me.”
It is an easy pit that all of us fall into time and again. An exotic, dynamic situation is so visually striking or emotionally compelling that we lose connection with ourselves making a photograph, and we let the event dictate the images. At that point we have stopped making an image. We're just taking pictures. Here is how I avoided that trap during my recent assignment.
The Acting III class exercise had students making themselves into the elements (earth, fire, water), finding an inner expression of that element and then taking an action and passing it along. I had photographed this kind of acting scenario elsewhere, and it was intense, profoundly visual, and slightly disturbing. I took way, way too many photos. I knew then I was in that swamped, overwhelmed state, and I was photographically dog-paddling my way through it. I accidentally got some good photographs, but I mostly got a lot of garbage.
I could see where I could go wrong again and changed tactics. Before I had been an outside observer, distanced from the exercise. This time I joined the group, more or less. “Close your eyes, feel your aura, make it expand.” I did exactly that, and felt, through closed eyes, where every other body in the room was. I felt the differences between them, and I moved and adjusted my position to where it felt the best.
The room was black. Black curtains, black floor, hard overhead light, but not a lot of it. I put the camera on manual, ISO at 3200, and took some test exposures to find a histogram I could live with.
I moved around the room with the group for several minutes before I even raised my camera. I was getting attuned. I wanted to keep that sense of energetic connection while I photographed, and I wanted the photographic moment to be as clear and explicit as I could make it.
The energy ramped up as actors became fire, water, earth; viscerally, gutturally, energetically expressing movement and sound that connected themselves with the elemental archetype. I held the agency's art direction for the assignment in mind: “display faculty-student mentoring relationships”. Almost every photograph therefore had the teacher in it. I composed the bodies moving in this black box, and I released the shutter only when I felt the moment had coalesced. While all this was happening, I was also feeling my energetic connection with the actors. When Earth was passed to one woman and she took off with it, I felt inexplicably happy. Anytime she was doing a movement, I felt the same way. When another actor became uncontrolled Fire, I felt compelled to seek safety in the far corner.
I was connected with the event in and around me, but I was also connected with my camera and my technique and the act of composing. This is how to do deep work. We negotiate a fine balance between immersion and witness. There lies the compelling image.
The professor commended me afterward for being part of the group. The actors were doing their creative work, I was doing mine, and we were in it together.
I always appreciate it when you write about the process of making photographs It's easy to think that photography is only about the print--and I admit that I still struggle a lot to understand the visual language and grammar of photographs.
But making photographs is a physical activity as much as a mental one. There are the obvious things like the way you hold the camera or whether you stand up straight or crouch down, but you show through your writing that it's much deeper than that.
We see it when a piano player bends close to the keyboard and then stretches up straight, or when an orator gestures and walks around behind the podium.
We can't separate our brain from our body and we need the support of both to do something compelling.
Posted by: Tommy Williams | October 08, 2008 at 07:28 PM