in a recent interview with on the onwardphoto blog, jorg colberg spoke about the importance of writing about photography.
http://tinyurl.com/qalulvr i couldn’t agree more with what he said. often times people who make photographs have trouble talking about them.
i am guilty too … it is HARD to write about photography, but with a little practice it gets a little easier.
i have a series of portraits i have been making since i was 19 ( more than half my life ). the project began years before and i didn’t even know it … when i was reading studds turkel’s book “working”, a book about people talking about what they do for work … i began my project by cold calling businesses and asking if i could photograph people who worked there. i was a fly on the wall, sometimes, other times i would have conversations with the subject to learn about what it was they were doing, and i would photograph where they worked too. i documented people that worked in slaugherhouses, were gravediggers, machineshop operators, mechanics, factory workers, butchers … people from all walks of life. i enjoyed talking with these strangers and learning about who they were, and creating almost a story that surrounded each portrait i took. eventually i began photographing people on the streets as i wandered their neighborhood with a camera, or where they had a late night snack, or breakfast. i continued with these portraits, even letting them lead me into paying jobs photographing people for magazines and newspapers, and i never stopped interviewing my subjects to learn a little bit about them.
when i worked for a eileen mcclure, she told me tricks she would do to get her subjects to loosen up a little bit. she only had seconds to do this seeing she had appointments every 20 minutes all day long … and she said she had it easy because she was a little old lady, and people don’t feel threatened by little old ladies. my trick ended up being just having a conversation, and because i was no longer a guy with a camera but someone else. over the years i think the project has taken a different shape, and really tells more about me than it does my subjects. if i wrote about the project, i would write about who my subjects were, and how meeting them changed how i look at portrait photography in general, but how i have learned that people are pretty much the same, whether they are rich, poor, a corporate titan, leader of a state, or someone sitting on their porch, who didn’t remember who i was or who she was a few weeks later when i returned with a print.
i couldn’t agree more with the idea that one should be able to write something, anything, about what it is they do or did with their camera.
