Yesterday I had my yearly visit from the students in Evergreen State College's photography program, led by Bob Haft. I spoke extemporaneously about whatever was on my mind. and they appeared to take value from that. One of the things that came to mind was contracts.
Every photograph we take is enclosed within a contract. It can be explicit or implicit. As a commercial shooter, I am accustomed to explicit contracts all the time--the terms of the assignment, the usage agreement, how much they're paying me. These are the boundaries of what I agree to do, what my client can do, and what my client and I agree to not do. And then the fun begins. I get into situations that I otherwise never would have found myself, and I make great photographs.
But even the most personal work is enclosed by an implicit contract, unspoken, bounded by values and morals. What I spoke to the students specifically is the exchange implicit in documentary photography, which is the focus of their work this year. The boundaries include permission, respect, an exchange of value, which means being as willing to disclose your self to your subject as they are to your lens.
Today I found myself at the boundary of that implicit contract and decided not to cross it. In Fremont there is, I discovered, a well known street artist who calls himself Benny the StoneDancer. He makes piles of precariously balanced stones around the neighborhood. When I came upon him he was standing on a chair, placing a large round rock on an impossibly narrow stack of stones. Everything about his face and posture showed immense struggle and focus. It was the pinnacle moment of the sculpture.
Two young girls stood, transfixed, a respectful distance away. I walked past them, up to the traffic cone barrier he had erected around his workspace between the sidewalk and the curb. I stood, in his line of sight, camera in hand. I could see the physical intensity of the effort, the struggle to place the rock, the strain in his arms, the alert, powerful focus of his face. I stood, waiting for the slightest sliver of acknowledgment of my presence. I was not going to raise my camera until I had that. I was not going to take a photograph without that permission.
He was in no place to give that acknowledgment. He was at the peak moment of whatever spiritual function this art serves for him, and I felt like an intruder standing there at the threshhold. The least I could do is to not break the spell, and collapse the structure with the shutter clap of an SLR camera.
Rocks fell. The sculpture collapsed. The artist jumped off his chair, but not before a rock hit his hand on its way to the ground. In that moment I saw a permanently bent finger, from a prior, more severe event. This must happen a lot, I thought. "It's cool, it's cool, everything is fine," he said. "Everything is good." It was as if he had read my mind, felt my instant guilt that my desire at the gate, my wish for his attention so that I could take a photograph caused a break of his focus and the collapse, and that he was reassuring me this wasn't the case.
Of course this may all be my projection. But I did not take the picture. That picture is vivid in my mind--the strained face, the impossibly tall stack of rocks as precarious as the chair he was standing on. I saw dozens of pictures in my mind. I captured none of them. We didn't have a contract for me to take them. We hadn't gotten there.
The cost was that I did not get the picure I saw. The value I got in exchange for that cost is that, I hope, we both emerged from the encounter with our integrity intact. That is worth more to me than a photograph.
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