Susan Meiselas: Expanding the Circle

Above: a six-minute video in which Susan Meiselas discusses "documentary photography's potential to connect and move audiences."

Working Weekends

A model poses for a photographer at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Friday, August 12, 2011.

A Face in the Crowd

I heard sirens, and went outside. I photographed this incident. I looked around at the crowd, and saw the expected mix of curiousity and shock that an accident had happened.

And then, there was the guy above.

The Tune Without the Words

A boy approaches a crow bitten by his dog, Los Angeles, Thursday, May 26,2011.

Riverside, Riverrun

Sant Khalsa explains her photographic practice while California Museum of Photography Director Colin Westerbeck listens during the opening reception for "Riverrun: Sant Khalsa's 20-year Journey with the Santa Ana River" in Riverside, Calif. on Saturday, May 7, 2011. The exhibition will be on display until August 13, 2011.

Riverrun

Sant Khalsa explains her photographic practice while California Museum of Photography Director Colin Westerbeck listens during the opening reception for "Riverrun: Sant Khalsa's 20-year Journey with the Santa Ana River" in Riverside, Calif. on Saturday, May 7, 2011. The exhibition will be on display until August 13, 2011.

In Love and Wha?

On my other blog on documentary photography I've been focused on photojournalism as a subject. So, lately, all of my reading has consisted of books written by photojournalists. I guess, if you think about it, that's not a great idea.

I mean, take people who are good at making pictures and ... have them write. Hmm.

That said, books about photojournalism don't have to be entirely about, you know, taking pictures. Sure, some photojournalists really consider that the important part. But if you want to sell some books, you might want to, you know, include other details.

Like, the specifics of your sex life.

Now, not everyone will be happy about that. You might get a mixed review here or there.

For example, here is Janet Reitman's review of Shutterbabe: Adventures in Love and War, the latest book I've finished reading.

Bang-bang girl
Perhaps the first "cowgirl" memoir was Leslie Cockburn's "Looking for Trouble," a reflection of her highs (and occasional lows) over 25 years as a foreign correspondent and television producer. While filled with amusing insights, Cockburn's book, with chapter heads such as "Dinner With Drug Lords" and "Lunch With the Ayatollahs," rubbed many critics the wrong way. It suggested a blue-blood Yale graduate waltzing around war zones in designer bush-wear.

Now comes "Shutterbabe: Adventures in Love and War," Deborah Copaken Kogan's memoir about her life as a roving war photographer. It's an unfortunate title, but I was willing to give the book a shot given how rare young female war photographers are -- let alone those who write about the experience. Alas, "Shutterbabe" is not so much a cowgirl memoir as a "bang-bang" memoir: a self-aggrandizing story of the lusts and yearnings of a bored, post-feminist bad girl with a hankering to "see war."

Now that you know ... read it anyway.

On Borders

Ever file out a negative carrier?

Here's the thing: at one time, film negatives were placed in a metal holder and then the holder was placed in an enlarger. The image was projected down onto photo paper, held in place by straight-edged blades that could be moved to crop the image. (In other words, the blades covered the paper and could therefore stop part of the projected image from reaching the paper. You could slide these blades to decide where to crop.)

Many documentary photographers, however, felt cropping went against their approach, and so they would slide these blades outward to let the "full frame" of the negative's image hit the paper. No cropping. They often went one step further, filing out the negative holder to be a little larger, thus avoiding accidental cropping caused by the holder.

The rough black line this produced as a border to the image became a bit ... fetishized. It was code for a certain type of "true" or "raw" photography.

Of course, looks get stolen and in the 1980s you saw many fashion photographers adopt the filed-out carrier -- so an incredibly planned, stylized, controlled image used the language of documentary in ads for perfume. It looked good.

Today, many people adopt the edge look a filed out carrier produces even in digital photos, and even in cropped photos. It means little now.

But consider the image above. I've presented it full frame -- my camera was set on 16:9 aspect ratio. I was riding on the Metrolink into Los Angeles when I saw the scene outside the window, and I quickly snapped a few shots with a 20mm lens on a Panasonic GH1. (The 35mm equivalent would be a 40mm lens.)

It includes a reflection on the window, and I feel it's important to explain it was taken from the train. But crop in a bit -- just inside the reflection, making a nearly-square image -- and do a bit of adjustment to the look of the image and one could easily believe it was taken standing near the action.

But then ... is it still a "document"? Does it change what it serves as "evidence" for? Is it a news photo at that point (keep in mind I don't know the situation at all, or anyone's names or the final outcome of the situation) or an art photo?

And what if, just off to the left, it turned out there was a movie camera recording everything, and that this was really a scene for a TV show?

Meet the New Blog, Same as the Old Blog

Well, not really the same. The new blog I've started is focused on documentary photography -- but is really meant to cover the merging of the tradition with new approaches to documentary filmmaking and new media. The first two posts:

What Would Walker Evans Do?


Statement of Purpose

Statement of Purpose

I have other blogs. You can see them in the right column. The reason I'm starting a new blog is to open a discussion on the emergence of a new, hybrid form of documentary photography that merges traditional approaches with techniques from documentary filmmaking, strategies from new media and concepts from fine art practice.

I still love traditional documentary photography, but that's not where we are anymore. New technologies like hybrid DSLRs (technically, DSLs, I suppose, since the best of these are now mirrorless), tiny audio recorders, inexpensive large-capacity memory cards, laptop-based video editing, and high-speed Internet access now make the old model only a jumping-off point.

These new capabilities -- arising at a time when traditional publishing is in crisis and a billion amateurs with cell phone cameras have spot news covered -- force us to ask: where should we take the idea of documentary photography? There's no moving backward. So where are we going?

New Documentary Photography Blog

I've started a new blog on Documentary Photography, and the first post asks the inevitable question:

What Would Walker Evans Do?

Future of Photojournalism

On Friday afternoon, Mrs. Actualities and I went to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to hear a panel on The Future of Investigative Reporting. On the panel were:

David Cohn, who founded http://spot.us -- essentially a "citizen journalism" site with a model based on bringing together freelancers, publishing venues and the public. In short: the public can support stories they feel are important, freelance journalists can get a little extra financial support to develop and research stories, and editors can get stories they can't support with their own publication / site resources.

Robert Rosenthal, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and journalism professor who is interested in the transition from traditional journalism to new models. He's connected to http://centerforinvestigativereporting.org but obviously well-versed in the existing models.

A.C. Thompson, who has worked with various San Francisco publications but is now associated with http://propublica.org and has received a Polk Award.

Lola Vollen, a physician who has shifted her work toward social justice and human rights, working with http://exonerated.org.

And, central to the panel: famed documentary photographer Susan Meiselas. If you don't know her work, look it up, and spend some time with it. http://susanmeiselas.com/. The important thing, for my discussion here, is to consider how Meiselas' model of going to a place, getting deeply invested in a story, and allowing a point of view to develop is purely documentary photography rather than photojournalism. Now, read that clearly: it isn't a critique, but praise. As well, it's an important distinction between the two fields.

The panel shifted a bit early on from what I expected -- after all, the context was an art museum, a show of Henri Cartier Bresson's work and the title "Future of Investigative Reporting" -- to more of a discussion of new models for supporting journalism. (Now, I'm quite aware of why this is on everyone's minds -- I've done a lot of freelance work in this realm and understand that it's clear the old models will change. Yet everyone seems unclear on how that change will stabilize or what models can be sustainable.)

So there was discussion noting that old support structures like "full time work" and "expense accounts" and "go to Central America for eight weeks, here's your ticket" were clearly gone, and that the new replacements are still developing -- and quite different in nature. Think of a blend between crowdfunding and NPR and you'll have part of the picture. Add YouTube, Digg and Twitter and you'll get a hint of the rest. But just a hint.

To my mind, this missed an important point.

Beyond the financial issues, the development of the Internet is important not just as a killer of the printed daily newspaper, but as a killer of one aspect of photojournalism.

That is, imagine an event happens. It's quite likely that a half-dozen civilians with cellphone cameras are there long before your contract photojournalist gets an alert email, and it's no surprise if there's a shaky video clip from a passerby on CNN immediately. Spot news? It's covered by a cell phone cam.

I'm not negating the value of a PJ here -- I just think the game has changed and that the role of the photojournalist has shifted toward documentary work. By this I mean that if there's a glut of "just okay shots" out there, and we can hand a DSLR to the reporter and have them come back with acceptable stills and video, then the role of photojournalist becomes about quality.

The role of the photojournalist becomes more like the role of the documentary photographer. Speed becomes less critical -- you've already been beat to the punch. But that leaves a ton of room for quality, depth, beauty, humor, accuracy -- all the elements the practice of documentary allows.

I want to see that first glance picture, yes, and I don't care that it's a sloppy picture without context. But I'm going to get much more out of a smart, deep, significant presentation later -- something only the best photojournalists can do.

So, for me, the question I see is not "how does investigative reporting survive?" but "how does an unknown Susan Meiselas find a way to do the work today?"

And How Does the Subject Feel?

Well, it seems the current economy has had people looking back to the WPA photographers....

Girl from iconic Great Depression photo: 'We were ashamed'

Lange was traveling through Nipomo, California, taking photographs of migrant farm workers for the Resettlement Administration. At the time, Thompson had seven children who worked with her in the fields.

"She asked my mother if she could take her picture -- that ... her name would never be published, but it was to help the people in the plight that we were all in, the hard times," McIntosh says.

"So mother let her take the picture, because she thought it would help."

New York Portraits

Over on my other blog -- New York Portraits -- I've been posting about my visit to the galleries in Chelsea. Of particular interest, from the standpoint of documentary, is the work of:

Kohei Yoshiyuki: The Park

"For these photos, taken in Tokyo’s Shinjuku, Yoyogi, and Aoyama parks during the 1970s, Mr. Yoshiyuki used a 35mm camera, infrared film, and flash to document the people who gathered there at night for clandestine trysts, as well as the many spectators lurking in the bushes who watched—and sometimes participated in—these couplings."

Showing at Yossi Milo Gallery (525 West 25th Street) until October 20th.