Joseph Rodriguez may be one of the last great classical documentary photographers working in America today. I can think of only a few others who represent a similar passion and commitment to telling the human stories. Brenda Ann Kenneally and Eugene Richards come to mind. I was fortunate enough to have Joseph as a mentor in my early years. I could still use him, but I know he has neither the time or the energy to mentor a photographer living thousands of miles away!
Joseph was featured in a rather interesting little book called Witness In Our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers, that also included personal and in-depth interview with the likes of Mary Ellen Mark, Sebastiao Salgado, Eugene Richards, Susan Meiseles, Graciela Iturbide, Dayanita Singh, Fazal Sheikh, and Antonin Kratochvil – a who’s who of great documentary photographers.
Here is a new piece that he has been working on. It is part of a series of stories Joseph is producing on the American prison system.
Notice that Joseph shoots human beings, not art objects or light or geometry or such. Human beings. His eye is drawn to gestures, movements, expressions and emotions. Its classic and its personal.
I don’t Anthony, but I do remember him for a little book he produced as we were preparing to wage war on Iraq. I don’t think a lot of people bothered with it, what with the hysteria and patriotic jingoism of the period. But Anthony went ahead and produced this little book calledFear This. I recommend you look it up. I don’t know how well it sold, but I suspect that given the atmosphere of the period, probably not a whole lot (I hope I am wrong). But what it did represent was an individual photographer’s response to the times. Here was a major, mainstream magazine photographer who held on to his individual sense of right and wrong, and very cleverly, in a quiet, civilized way, choose to say something about it.
Anthony Suau also won a World Press Photo award this year. Here is a short video of him. I also post this to show you what working with as little equipment as possible can be a powerful way to allow your individuality and voice to come forward. You are forced to rely on your skills, mental and physical, to compensate and adjust to overcome what first appear to be limitations.
I will post a few other videos in the coming hours/days. They will repeat the same mantra; simple equipment, sophisticated eyes, and a mind that is seriously seeing.
After reading some of the recent posts focusing on the divergent and/or contradictory demands of academic and photographic project objectives, I thought that it would be useful for you all to step back and reconsider things.
Ira Glass. This American Life. A brilliant story teller. An amazing journalist. An inspiration to many. My friend Zoriah reminded me that perhaps the students should hear him talk about creative story telling and how the best of them actually work. He himself has written a post about Ira Glass on his blog.
So I am posting a bunch of his videos for you here so that you are inspired and excited and liberated!
And another where he talks about finding stories
And then of course the discussion wanders over to why failure is inevitable but holds us together is our aesthetic values (this is my favorite video in the sequence.)
And finally, the 2 major mistakes beginners make; to abandon your life and to abandon yourself in your work!
Ajmer is an incredible and rare opportunity to explore and unleash a creative side to you that liberates you from the strict, often well defined requirements of academic work. That is, you have to appreciate that the stories inAjmer allow you to tickle that human, creative, and imaginative side of you that you may typically hold back in your academic writings. That is, be quirky, be unconventional, be daring and be simply inspired. Not to say that all that can’t be applied to academic research and writings, but I think you all understand what I mean.
This is about story telling. It is about creating something that excites, informs and inspires. It is actually more difficult than a written paper because you do not have the luxury of endless references, tangential discussions on background, footnotes and such. It is just a pure, simple, straight forward story.
And it is a fabulous complement to what you are typically used to delivering; the photography reveals the human consequences and responses to the broader, underlying, academic issues you are exploring. Think of it as the hook that compels someone to read your more detailed research. For example, if we are examining Special Economic Zones (SEZ) than the research speak to their origins, goals and reasoning for creation, and also to the resistance of the local communities and why. The photo project then can reveal the human side of this story through one individual and concentrate on their agency, their response and their views. So the two work together!
We are 3 weeks away from entering a new world of people we typically do not meet and definitely do not know. This can be scary, but it is also one of the most exciting things you will do in your life. I promise you that.
Do not approach the photography like an assignment because you will struggle, panic and worse, fail at it. Approach photography as a human being first, who is meeting and trying to understand the lives, experiences and perspectives of other human beings. Hear their stories, and most importantly, hear your own responses to their stories. And it is in these personal responses that you photos and your narrative will begin to offer itself.
I quote Huxley: Experience is not what happens to you, it is what you do with what happens to you.
And what you do with your experiences with these amazing people you will meet will be based on you as an individual, a human being and then as a photographer using photographs and text to express it.
Some of you have been asking questions about which tools and what versions and such, so I thought it best to write another discussion about software and specifically about image manipulation tools.
First, there is no need to invest a lot of money in tools like Photoshop CS 3 or CS 4 if you have not already done so. Photoshop is expensive. This is a narrative photography workshop and our focus is on our stories, and the way in which we construct them and present them. This is not a photography tools and image enhancement workshop so we need to worry about whether we have the ‘best’ or the ‘latest’. We just need the workable.
There are some excellent image manipulation tools that pretty much do all if not more than Photoshop CS 3/4 offer. Remember that Photoshop was not specifically designed for photographers, and there are products now available that were in fact specifically designed for photographers.
Tools like GIMP and GIMPShop are free, created under the Open Source software development structure. They are reliable and excellent and do most all that Photoshop can. And there are simpler, more basic products also available on the internet but the nice thing about the GIMP structure is that it can handle most all RAW formats including the .DNG format.
Also, there are the more simpler photographic tools like Lightroom and Aperture, but one that few people know about and is in fact very good is LightZone. It quite cheap, less than $100, and more importantly, it is fast, completely non-destructive in its image tools and of a size that will not grab a lot of your hard disk space.
I already discussed alternatives to iView Media Pro in a previous post.
I recommend you look it up. I don’t know how well it sold, but I suspect that given the atmosphere of the period, probably not a whole lot (I hope I am wrong). But what it did represent was an individual photographer’s response to the times. Here was a major, mainstream magazine photographer who held on to his individual sense of right and wrong, and very cleverly, in a quiet, civilized way, choose to say something about it.